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,XV-. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 



>. N. 



\. 



A 

Tennyson Primer 



A CRITICAL ESSAY 



BY 

WILLIAM MACNEILE DIXON 

LiTT.D., A.M., LL.B. " 

FROFESSOR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE IN KASON 

COLLEGE, BIRMINGHAM, AUTHOR OF "ENGLISH POETRY 

FROM BLAKE TO BROWNING." 




NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 
1 896 






CoPYRIOHT, 1896, BY 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 



</? 



710 

EDIVARD T)01VDEN. 

!My T)ear Trofessor T)owden : 

I wish to inscribe this book to j>ou, because, 
though it does not claim the distinction of literacy 
value which belongs to your work, it may prove useful 
to readers of modern poetry ; and if it so proved, I 
should be glad to think that the name of one to whom 
I owe so much — and that not merely as a student — 
might be read here as that of my teacher and friend. 

Very sincerely yours, 

W. Macneile Dixon. 



jrV 



CONTENTS 



Chap. I. "Biography. 
Parentage and Childhood 
At Cambridge 

Marriage and Poet Laureateship 
Married Life, Travels and Political Poems 
Maud and the Idylls of the King 
The Dramas . ' . 

Closing Years 

Chap. II. The Toe ins. 
Poems by Two Brothers 
Timbuctoo and the Poems of 1830 . 
The Poems of 1832 . 
The Poems of 1842 . 



Page 
1 

3 

'5 
>7 
20 

3' 
35 



39 
42 

47 

53 



Chap. 111. 

The Princess, 



.847 



59 



Chap. IV. 

In Memoriam, i8so . 
Maud and Other Poems 



74 

85 



Chap. V. 

Idylls of the King, 1859-8, . 
Enoch Arden, etc., 1864 
The Dramas 
Ballads and Otiier Poems 



9> 
105 
110 
116 



Chap. VI. 

A Critical Essay 



125 



Appendix. 

List of Dates and Bibliography 



M5 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 



CHAPTER I. 

Alfred Tennyson, the acknowledged representa- 
tive of his age in poetry, was born on August 6, 
1809, at Somersby Rectory, in the village of Somers- 
by, in Lincolnshire. His parents were of gentle 
blood : his father, tlie Rev. George Clayton Ten- 
nyson, rector of Somersby and vicar of 
Grimsby, a man of exceptional culture, Parentage 
versatile powers, imagin^itive temper, and and 
strongly marked character ; his mother, a Childhood, 
daughter of the Rev. Stephen Fytche, vicar 
of Louth. Frederick and Charles (afterwards Charles 
Tennyson-Turner), who preceded Alfred in a family 
of twelve, both became distinguished as poets in 
after life. From his earliest years Alfred was devoted 
to poetry, and seemed destined for a poetical career. 
His first recorded verse was the cry that broke from 
him, when a child of five, as the wind hurried him 
down the garden walk : 

" I hear a voice that's speaking in the wind." 

While still very young, some verses written upon 
his slate — the subject, the flowers in the rectory gar- 
den — modelled upon Thomson, the only poet he had 
then read, were rewarded by a I' Yes, you can write," 
from his brother ; a little later the death of his grand- 



2 A TENNYSON PRIMER, 

mother was the theme of a poem which drew from 
his grandfather half a sovereign, and the prophecy, 
soon to be falsified, " That is the first money, my boy, 
that you've made by poetry, and, take my word for 
it, it will be the last." 

Perhaps the lines in the Poems by Two Brothers^ be, 
ginning, " There on the bier she sleeps," are an im- 
proved version of this early attempt.* In his twelfth 
year he was busy on an epic in imitation of Scott, 
which ran to some thousand lines, and in his fifteenth 
he essayed a drama. Of the epic it is interest- 
ing to note that, in his father's judgment, it gave 
promise of a famous future. " If that boy dies," said 
Mr. Tennyson, " one of our greatest poets will have 
gone." 

After the village school came the grammar school 
at Louth, followed in its turn by home tuition. The 
changes hardly broke the tranquil, dreamy life spent 
by the boy, chiefly alone — for he was naturally of re- 
tiring disposition — or in long rambles with his favour- 
ite brother Charles. The news of Byron's death, in 
•1824, was the first wave of emotion from the outside 
world that touched him. " I thought," he said, 
" that everything was over and finished for every one 
— that nothing else mattered. I remember I walked 
out alone and carved ' Byron is dead !' into the sand- 
stone." Two years later Alfred and Charles joined 
in a poetical venture, and put forth a small volume ; 
but rather, it appears, in search of pocket-money 
than fame. . A Louth bookseller, Jackson by name, 
was induced to give twenty pounds for the copyright of 
thtw Juvenilia. The Poems by Two Brothers (1826), 

* Signed, however, " C. T." in the 1S93 edition. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 3 

containing one hundred and two short poems, was pub- 
lished, and the money spent on a tour round the 
churches of Lincolnshire. 

The scenery of Lincolnshire is faithfully sketched 
as background to all the early poetry of Tennyson 
which is not purely derivative ; the rich meadow and 
gradual slope, the " ridged wolds," the picturesque 
wandering lanes, as well as the " glooming flats" 
and less attractive features of the fen country, appear 
in it, even the 

"... woods that belt the gray hillside, 
The seven elms, the poplars four 
That stand beside my father's door." 

— Ode to Memory. 

In 1828 Charles and Alfred went up to Trinity 
College, Cambridge, whither Frederick had pre- 
ceded them. Alfred's rooms were in Corpus Build- 
ings, overlooking the main quadrangle of King's 
College, and within hearing of its chapel 
organ. The change from the quiet, rural At 
life of his childhood to that of the univer- Cambridge. 
sity, where many of the lasting friend- 
ships of his life were made, was fraught with 
important influences upon Tennyson's career. He 
became the central figure of a group of brilliant 
young men, not a few of whom bore names afterwards 
distinguished : Richard Monckton Milnes (afterwards 
Lord Houghton), James Spedding (the "J. S." of 
the poem, " You ask me why, tho' ill at ease"), 
J, M. Kemble (the "J. M. K." of the sonnet, " My 
heart and hope is with thee"), Richard Chenevix 
Trench (afterwards Archbishop of Dublin), W. H. 
Brookfield (to whom the sonnet, " Brooks, for they 



4 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

called you so that knew you best," was addressed), 
Henry Alford (afterwards Dean of Canterbury), Ed- 
ward Lushington, Charles Merivale (afterwards Dean 
of Ely), and Arthur Hallam, the eldest son of Henry 
Hallam, the historian.* Between Arthur Hallam and 
Alfred Tennyson grew up a friendship so close and 
deep as rightly to be named ideal — a friendship which, 
though cut short by Hallam 's death in less than five 
years {In Mcmoriam, xxii.), must be reckoned one of 
the great determining forces of the poet's life. Hal- 
lam, Tennyson's junior by two years, was at this 
time the more widely read and accomplished scholar, 
and gave equal promise of future name and fame. 
His engagement, in the year in which he left Cam- 
bridge, to Emily Tennyson, Alfred's sister, promised 
to add another bond to that of friendship {In Me- 
moriam, Ixxxiv.), a promise sadly unfulfilled. 

Before going up to the University, Tennyson had 
been at work upon a poem entitled The Lover's Tale. 
After a few years' interval the first and second parts 
appeared in print in 1833 (the same year as Brown- 
ing's Pauline), "when," wrote the author (in the 
preface to the edition of 1879), " feeling the imperfec- 
tion of the poem, I withdrew it from the press." 
Copies were, however, in circulation, and the work 
was reprinted without his consent and without the 
improvements which were in contemplation. In self- 
defence a corrected and improved version, with the 
addition of a third part. The Golden SuJ^per, a work of 
the author's mature life, was published in 1879. The 
Lover's Tale contains one line — 

" A center'd glory-circled memory" — 

* Thackeray, afterwards a warm friend, was also a contemporary 
of the Tennysons at Trinity College. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 5 

of which Tennyson had already made use in his now 
famous university prize poem, a fact which may be 
noted as an example of his almost parsimonious habit 
of treasuring a good line like a jewel until he could 
find for it a suitable setting. Three lines, also from 
the same poem, appear again in the Ode to Memory* 

In 1829, Milnes, Hallam, and Alfred Tennyson were 
all competitors for the Vice-Chancellor's medal in 
English verse — the subject " Timbuctoo." Tennyson 
was a candidate at his father's request, and the 
verses sent in were remodelled to some extent from 
an unfinished earlier poem on the Battle of Armaged- 
don. To him the medal was awarded, despite the fact 
that it was supposed to be de rigueur that the com- 
positions should be in the heroic couplet, and Tenny- 
son had chosen for his metre blank verse. Promise of 
great poetry to come was found in Timbuctoo by 
several acute readers, and it is creditable to the dis- 
cernment of the examiners that they were able to ap- 
preciate its merit. Both here and in 77ie Lover s 
Tale the influence of Shelley is clearly evidenced, 
but the ring and movement of the blank verse which 
we now recognise as Tennysonian unmistakably dis- 
play themselves. 

During the autumn of 1830 Hallam and Tennyson 
visited Spain — a visit commemorated in The Valley of 
Cauteretz — to carry money and letters of encourage- 
ment to the revolutionists, with some of whose leaders 
they had interviews.! The enthusiasm of the youth- 

* " Sure she was nigher to heaven's spheres. 
Listening the lordly music flowing from 
Th' illimitable years." 

— Ode to Memory. 

f " A wild time we had of it," Hallam said. " I played my part 



6 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

ful poets had been kindled by the struggle for freedom 
in the Spanish war of independence, much as the spirits 
of Wordsworth and Coleridge had been aroused by 
the hopes of the French Revolution. But, like Words- 
worth, Tenn3'Son came to a different and perhaps 
wiser mind when his knowledge of revolutionary men 
and methods was nearer and more personal. In this 
year of the visit to the Pyrenees was published Alfred's 
first independent volume of verse. Poems, Chiefly Lyri- 
cal. The original design had been to include poems 
by Hallam in the volume, but owing to the disap- 
proval expressed by Hallam's father the idea of a 
poetic partnership was given up, and the book ap- 
peared as we have it. In this year also appeared a 
volume of poems, Sonnets and Fugitive Pieces, by Charles 
Tennyson, the brother with whom Alfred had joined 
in the production of the Poems by Two Brothers. 
Wordsworth, writing from Cambridge about this time, 
remarked : " We have also a respectable show of blos- 
som in poetry — two brothers of the name of Tenny- 
son ; one in particular not a little promising." 

The death of his father in March, 1831, brought 
Tennyson's University career to a close without a 
degree, nor does it seem that he had any regard for 
the traditions of Cambridge or breathed its atmosphere 
with any keen enjoyment.* He had taken little part 

as conspirator in a small way, and made friends with two or three 
gallant men, who have since been trying their luck with Valdes." 

* The following sonnet, written in pencil, appears on the fly-leaf 
of the 1833 volume in the Dyce collection of the South Kensington 
Museum : 

" Therefore your halls, your ancient colleges, 

Your portals statued with old kings and queens. 
Your gardens, myriad-volumed libraries. 

Wax-lighted chapels, and rich carven screens, 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 7 

in the life a university offers, and was never a candidate 
for academic distinctions. To a chosen few, a coterie 
known as " the Apostles" {In Meffwriam, Ixxxvii.), he 
was accustomed to read his verses as they were com- 
posed, but it was understood that no criticism would 
be acceptable. From the first the natural sensitiveness 
of the poet, which increased in later life to an almost 
morbid degree, made him extremely averse to a word 
of dispraise. The same sensitiveness debarred him 
from playing any active part in the world of men, and 
at no period was his circle of acquaintanceship large. 
But while impatient of adverse criticism, there was 
never author who turned it to better account when it 
came ; and the day of its coming was not long delayed. 
The first rude breath of censure blew from the critical 
journals, Blackwood and the Quarterly, soon after the 
appearance of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, and the Poems of 
1832. The article in Blacktvood was written by Chris- 
topher North (John Wilson) in May, 1832, in the 
trenchant style of the reviews of the time, and that in 
the Quarterly (July, 1833), almost certainly by Lock- 

Your doctors, and your proctors, and your deans, 

Shall not avail you, when the day-beam sports 
New risen o'er awakened Albion — no ! 

Nor yet your solemn organ-pipes that blow 
Melodious thunders thro' your vacant courts 

At morn and eve — because your manner sorts 
Not with this age wherefrom you stand apart. 

Because the lips of little children preach 
Against you, you that do profess to teach. 

And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart." 

The following note is appended : "I have a great affection for 
my old university, and can only regret that this spirit of under- 
graduate irritability against the Cambridge of that day ever found 
its way into print." 



8 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

hart, the editor, was even more severe. Wilson de- 
scribed Tennyson as "the pet of a cockney coterie," 
a remark at the time not so very wide of the truth, 
and Lockhart praised some of the poems in a vein of 
caustic irony. But both critics found genius in the 
work of the new poet, and it is with the manner rather 
than the matter of the reviews that any reasonable 
quarrel can be raised. While Tennyson replied to the 
Blackwood article bitterly enough in the verses, after- 
wards suppressed, describing Wilson as " rusty, fusty 
Christopher," he was careful to adopt his suggestions 
almost without exception ; and though the Quarterly re- 
view was resented, it was honoured scrupulously in the 
same way. This was to exhibit the temper of the 
child, but to act like a man. The voices, moreover, 
were very far from being all against Tennyson. Cole- 
ridge praised the poems, while he expressed the opin- 
ion that the new poet was not yet master of the 
metrical craft, and confessed to his own difficulty in 
scanning some of the verses. The Westminster Review 
of January, 1S31, had been full of eulogv ; Hallam him- 
self, in the Englishman's Magazine of August, had 
warmly praised the genius of his friend in a glowing 
article, and Leigh Hunt, in the Tatlcr of the same 
year (February and March), in reviewing Alfred's 
poems, together with the volume of sonnets by 
Charles, while he praised both, had predicted the 
laurel of the future for Alfred. 

In the year that Arthur Hallam took his degree 
(1832) he was a guest at Somersby. "Fifty years 
hence people will make pilgrimages to this place," he 
said. About this time his engagement to Emily Ten- 
nyson was made public, and he went up to London to 
begin his/ career at the bar, the profession he had 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 9 

chosen as the best avenue to the public life to which 
he looked. Until compelled, the following year, to 
seek health abroad, Hallam was domiciled at 67 
Wimpole Street — " the dark house in the long 
unlovely street." " You will always find me at sixes 
and sevens," he was accustomed to say as a mnemonic 
for his friends. In September of 1833 the end came. 

" In Vienna's fatal walls 

God's finger toucht him, and he slept." 

After Arthur Hallam's death Tennyson went to re- 
side in London. So deep and poignant a sorrow as the 
early loss of his best-loved friend hung like a heavy 
cloud over his life. It was Tennyson's " dark hour," 
and years passed before he could bring him- 
self to find relief even in poetry. No volume I1 London, 
was published between the Poems of 1832 
and the revised and enlarged edition, in two volumes, 
of 1842. Occasional verses had appeared in 1831 in 
the Gem, and in the following year in the English Mag- 
azine, the Yorkshire Literary Annual, and Friendship's 
Offering ; and others followed. St. Agnes^ Eve was first 
published in The Keepsake in 1837, and the song, " Oh 
that 'twere possible," in the Tribute in the same year. 

During these silent years in London Tennyson be- 
came one of Carlyle's most frequent visitors — none 
more congenial — " a true human soul or some authen- 
tic approximation thereto, to whom your own soul 
can say. Brother !" The poet of these London days 
was described in Carlyle's picturesque style thus : 
" A great shock of rough, dusty-dark hair ; bright, 
laughing, hazel eyes ; massive aquiline face, most 
massive, yet most delicate ; of sallow brown complex- 
ion, almost Indian-looking ; clothes cynically loose, 



lO A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

free and easy ; smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is 
musically metallic — fit for loud laughter and piercing 
wail, and all that ma}'^ lie between ; speech and specu- 
lation free and plenteous ; I do not meet in these late 
decades such company over a pipe." In 1838 he ap- 
peared as a member of the Anonymous Club, of 
which Carlyle, Mill, Thackeray, Landor, Macready 
Sterling, Cunningham, and other men of letters were 
members. Some of his poems were handed about in 
manuscript and read by friends. Landor praised in 
especial (December, 1837) the poem we know as the 
Morte iV Arthur as " more Homeric than any poem 
of our time, and rivalling some of the noblest parts of 
the Odyssea." The details of this period of Tenny- 
son's life are but scanty, and there is little for a bio- 
grapher to relate. We know that he became strongly 
attached to Rogers, the veteran poet, and at his house 
met, among men of note, Gladstone, Leigh Hunt, and 
Tom Moore. The following note occurs in the diary 
of Henry Crabb Robinson : 

"31 Jan., 1845. I dined this day with Rogers. We 
had an interesting party of eight — Moxon, the pub- 
lisher ; Kenny, the dramatic poet ; Spedding, Lush- 
ington, and Alfred Tennyson, three young men of 
eminent talent, belonging to literary young England 
— the latter, Tennyson, being by far the most eminent 
of the young poets. He is an admirer of Goethe, and 
I had a long tcte-a-tHe v^'xXh him about the great poet." 

It is certain that Carlyle's influence was a potent 
factor in the enlargement and development of his in- 
tellectual sympathies ; and to it, as well as to Hallam's 
death, is due the graver, more philosophical note 
soon to be heard in Tennyson's poetry. While he 
still continued to pay studious attentitm to the ex- 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. II 

ternal form of his verse, he essayed higher subjects and 
grappled with the deeper problems. In these days he 
met and talked far into the night, smoking '* infinite 
tobacco," with his chosen friends, or read far and 
wide, and brooded over the poems that were to set the 
seal upon his reputation in the 1842 volumes ; in Car- 
lyle's words, " carrying a bit of chaos about him which 
he was manufacturing into kosmos." With the pub- 
lication of the volumes just mentioned Tennyson's 
place in English literature was beyond question as- 
sured. The author of Locksley Hall, Ulysses, the Vision 
of Sin, and the Morte d' Arthur was universally ac- 
knowledged the first poet of the day. " He is de- 
cidedly," wrote, in 1845, Wordsworth, whom he had 
met for the first time two years earlier, " the first of 
our living poets." That year saw the fourth edition 
of the two volumes, and Moxon, his publisher, con- 
fessed that Tennyson was the only poet by the pub- 
lication of whose work he was not a loser. 

In 1837 the Tennyson family had left Somersby for 
Beech Hill House, near Hill Beech, situated on the 
border of Epping Forest, and near Waltham Abbey, 
whose bells are addressed in the fine greeting to the 
New Year, now familiar to all English ears : 

" Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky !" 

In 1840 came another change to Tunbridge Wells, 
and in the next year still another to Boxley, near 
Maidstone. Here Alfred's youngest sister, Cecilia, 
was married to Edmund Law Lushington, professor 
of Greek in the University of Glasgow, the wedding 
which is the subject of the closing section of In Me- 
moriam. In 1845,* through the influence of Milnes, 

* In 1844 Edgar Allen Poe, carried away by the artistic beauty of 



12 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Tennyson's name was placed by Sir Robert Peel, 
\vlu> had never previously heard of the poet, upon the 
Civil List for a pension of two hundred pounds a year, 
and his pecuniary anxieties, for some time pressing, 
were at an end. Though approved of by the major- 
ity, by some the pension was considered premature, 
and Bulwer Lytton, in his satire. The New Ti/uon, made 
a sharp attack upon Tennyson, both as poet and pen- 
sioner. He was there spoken of as " School-Miss Al 
fred," and his poetry described as 

..." a jingling medley of purloined conceits 
Out-babj'ing Wordsworth, and out-glittering Keats." 

A note to the passage stated that Tennyson had 
been "quartered on the public purse in the prime of 
life, without either wife or family." The reply was 
not delayed, and a set of verses in Punch, signed '* Al- 
cibiades," proved that stinging satire was quite within 
Tennyson's reach also, had he cared to enter that 
field.* An Afterthought, now included in his works 

form in Tennyson's poems, wrote enthusiastically: "I am not 
sure that Tennyson is not the greatest of poets." 

* ■' We know him out of Shakespeare's art. 

And those fine curses which he spoke — 
The old Timon with his noble heart, 
That strongly loathing, greatly broke. 

' So died the Old, here comes the New ; 
Regard him — a familiar face ; 
I thought we knew him. What, it's you. 
The padded man that wears the stays — 

" Who killed the girls and thrilled the boys 
With dandy pathos when you wrote — 
O Lion ! you that made a noise, 
.-\nd shook a mane en faf^i Notes. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 1 3 

under the title of Lifcra/y Squahhics, appeared the fol- 
lowing week over the same signature, and more justly 
represents Tennyson's true attitude towards such con- 
troversies. The passiige of detraction in the New 
Timon was subsequently excised ; and the amende hon- 
orable was acknowledged by the dedication, in 1876, 
of the drama of Harold to the novelist's son. Among 
other attacks may be noted the Bon Gaultier Ballads 
(the work of Theodore Martin and W. E. Aytoun), 
1S45, which contained some clever parodies of the 
1842 poems.* About this time Howitt wrote of 
Tennyson : " It is very possible you may come across 

" But men of long-enduring hopes, 

And careless what the hour may bring, 
Can pardon little would-be Popes, 

And Brummels when they try to sting, 

" An artist, sir, should rest in art. 
And waive a little of his claim ; 
To have the great poetic heart 

Is more than all poetic fame. 
***** 

" A Timon you ! Nay, nay, for shame, 
It looks too arrogant a jest — 
That fierce old man — to take his name. 
You bandbox ! off, and let him rest." 

* The following stanza from The Laiircati-, parodying The Mer- 
man, will serve as an example : 

" Who would not be 
The Laureate bold, 
With his butt of sherry 
To keep him merry, 
And nothing to do but to pocket his gold. 
'Tis I would be the Laureate bold " 
This was written on the death of Southey (1843), and was in- 
tended as an ironical demand for the appointment of Tennyson. 



14 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

him in a country inn, with a foot on each hob of the 
fireplace, a volume of Greek in one hand, his meer- 
schaum in the other, so far advanced towards the 
seventh heaven that he would not thank you to call 
him back into this nether world." 

Although Tennyson's reputation was now firmly 
established, there wanted not on the part of the best 
critics a certain reticence as to the quality of his at- 
tainment. In 1846, Wordsworth, in conversation with 
Thomas Cooper, spoke some weighty words which 
probably represented the more reserved and less en- 
thusiastic verdict of the time, the opinion of those who 
felt that so far the new poet had given signs indeed of 
very unusual power, but had trifled with his art rather 
than given himself seriously to its greater aims- 
" There is little," said Wordsworth, " that can be 
called high poetry. Mr. Tennyson affords, indeed, 
the richest promise. He will do great things yet, and 
ought to have done greater things by this time." Ere- 
long he was to show the best he had to give. In 1848 
a new issue of The Princess (published the previous 
year) " produced among the fogs and smuts of Lin- 
coln's Inn," appeared, with a dedication to Henry 
Lushington, the friend whom Tennyson was accus- 
tomed to speak of as "his most suggestive critic." 
But the central year of the century was Tennyson's 
Aiinus Mirabilis, the year which saw the publication 
of his greatest poem, his marriage, and his appoint 
ment as Poet Laureate. 

In 1850 Tennyson left Cheltenham, where he had 
chiefly resided from 1S44. The years that lay between 
these two dates were mainly occupied in the composi- 
tion of the g "eat elegy which enshrines the memory of 
Arthur Hallam. /// Afemoriain appeared in 1850, at first 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. I 5 

anonymously. On June 13 of the same year, the author 
was married at Shiplake Church, Oxfordshire, to Emily 
Sellwood, a niece of Sir John Franklin, the 
Arctic explorer. Wordsworth had died Marriage 
earlier in the year, and in November Al- a,nd Poet 
fred Tennyson was appointed his succes- l'*^J^*8,tesnip. 
sor as Poet Laureate,* and the seal of 
national recognition placed upon his already great 
fame. For two years after his marriage, on his re- 
turn from a wedding journey in Italy,f the poet lived 
at Twickenham, famous on account of Pope's resi- 
dence there, and now (as Mr. G. J. Cayley, in a blank 
verse letter, wrote to the Laureate) "twice classic." 

From this year until that of his death Tennyson's 
career was a summer of unbroken splendour, clouded 
only by the death of his brother Charles, in 1879, and 
his son Lionel, in 1885. Unlike most poets, he lived 
a long life through in the sunshine of critical as well 
as popular favour, honoured by all and reverenced by 

*The post was offered to and declined by Rogers. 

t See The Daisy. 

His verses To the Queen, written after his appointment to the 
Laureateship, have been so altered and amended that scarcely a line 
of the original remains as at first. The original MS. contained 
these two verses, afterwards omitted ; 

" Nor should I dare to flatter state, 
Nor such a lay would you receive 
Were I to shape it, who believe 

Your nature true as you are great. 

***** 

" She brought a vast design to pass 

When Europe and the scatter'd ends 
Of our fierce world did meet as friends 
And brethren in her halls of glass." 
The reference here is to the Crystal Palace of 1851. 



1 6 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

many as among the very greatest of English poets. 
No such supreme lot has perhaps ever fallen to a 
poet of any race or country in the history of the 
world, 

Tennyson's almost immediate and unanimous ac- 
ceptance as a poet — a circumstance in itself usually 
far from prophetic of enduring fame — may be set 
down as due in part to the versatility of his poetic 
manner, and in part to the absence of serious rivals. 
He was fortunate in the possession of many brilliant 
gifts; he was perhaps even more fortunate in his birth 
time, and in the length of days granted him, with 
faculties unimpaired, and with ample space wherein 
to stablish his monument and enjoy his fame. Of the 
great poets of the century, but few reached even 
middle life ; for Keats and Shelley and Byron the 
light was early quenched ; Wordsworth and Southey 
and Coleridge had overlived their poetic prime, and 
the fruit of public acceptance was once more ripe for 
plucking. And Tennyson, in whose brain the man of 
the world was not unrepresented, took the nearest 
way to fame in that he made appeal, in almost every 
volume of verse published in his earlier years, to the 
people as well as to the critics. He was the man of 
the hour, and, with no very definite or sagacious 
opinions to offer, gave expression in his poetry to the 
prevailing feelings, the prevailing thought of the time. 
The admiration of the few and the critical was ex- 
cited by the perfection of his art, the admiration of 
the many and unsophisticated readers of poetry by 
the simple and graceful treatment of themes gener- 
ally themselves simple, frequently English. The few 
were delighted to find their own thoughts in the deli- 
cate and exquisite version of a scholar of perfect 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 1/ 

taste ; the many could not deny that here were poems 
which never ran on to undue lengths, easily understood, 
even more easily enjoyed, and praised by all poetical 
authorities. 

The first year of Tennyson's married life was partly 
spent in Italy, the route chosen being through the 
Riviera to Florence. Save for a few stanzas in The 
Keepsake, a. farewell sonnet to Macready, 
read by John Forster at the banquet Married Life, 
given the actor on the eve of his depart- Travels, and 
ure, and the dedication "to the Queen"* ^°"tical Poems, 
of the seventh edition of the Poems, 
there was nothing of importance published during 
the year. But in 1852 the political horizon became 
clouded and threatening, and Tennyson, in company 
with most of his countrymen, viewed with extreme 
distrusT' the events taking place in France. The 
period of excitement that followed the coup d'etat of 
December, the abolition of the constitution of the 
French Republic by Louis Napoleon, gave birth to 
three patriotic lyrics, published under the pseudonym 
of "Merlin" \x\ \)i\& Examiner. It was not until 1872 
that Tennyson acknowledged the authorship of these 
lyrics by the publication in the library edition of his 
works of the stirring lines entitled The Third of 
February, which, with the poems, Britons, Guard your 
Otvii and Hands all Round, had given full expression 
to the national feeling in England towards the French 
emperor and those weak-kneed English peers who. 



* Tennyson was presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, 
on his appointment to be Poet Laureate, March 6, 1851. It is said 
he was dressed in Rogers' court dress, worn on a former occasion 
by Wordsworth. 



1 8 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

to purchase peace at any price, would have " salved 
the tyrant o'er." 

In September the Duke of Wellington died, and 
upon the day of his funeral appeared in the Tifnes 
the first version of Tennyson's funeral ode, a poem 
which, if studied in its various editions, will give con- 
siderable insight into the author's careful methods of 
work. There was little enthusiasm over the ode in 
its early form, and it was severely criticised in the 
Press. Tennyson was much gratified by Henry 
Taylor's approval — *' It has a greatness worthy of its 
theme, and an absolute simplicity and truth, with all 
the poetic passion of your nature moving beneath" — 
and replying, wrote : " Thanks ! thanks ! In the all 
but universal depreciation of my ode by the Press, the 
prompt and hearty approval of it by a man as true as 
the Duke himself is doubly grateful." The second 
edition, published in 1853, was greatly altered and ex- 
tended, and further improvements were introduced 
before its reappearance in the Afa u ti xolumo. of 1856. 
The following lines in the first were omitted in all 
the subsequent editions : 

" Perchance our greatness will increase ; 
Perchance a darkening future yields 
Some reverse from worse to worse, 
The blood of men in quiet fields. 
And sprinkled on the sheaves of peace." 

In this 5'ear the poet's eldest son, Hallam, was born 
at Twickenham, and in the following year the family 
removed to Farringford, in Freshwater. The lanes 
and breezy downs, the meadow and wood and views 
of sea of the Farringford district form the back- 
ground of his later poetic descriptions, as the flats and 
level wastes and marshes of Lincolnshire had done in 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 19 

the earlier. In his poetic invitation to the Rev. F. D. 
Maurice, on the occasion of his expulsion from King's 
College, London, Tennyson accurately describes the 
surroundings of his home in the Isle of Wight : 

" Where, far from noise and smoke of town, 
I watch the twilight falling brown 

All round a careless-order'd garden 
Close to the ridge of a noble down. 

***** 

" For groves of pine on either hand, 
To break the blast of winter, stand ; 
And further on, the hoary Channel 
Tumbles a billow on chalk and sand." 

Here, w^here Lionel, his second son, was born in 
1854, Tennyson lived until 1870. In 1853 appeared 
the eighth edition of the Poems and the fifth edition 
of the Princess^ w^hich, like the Ode on the Death of 
the Duke of Wellington, had undergone many altera- 
tions and editions ; the third edition in especial pre- 
senting the poem in many parts completely rewritten, 
and with the addition of the songs, which may be re- 
garded as its chiefest beauty. In 1854* appeared in 
the Examiner (December 9) the first draught of The 
Charge of the Light Brigade, a poem of which three 
versions are extant. The final version appeared as a 
separate publication, with the following note by the 
author : 

"Having heard that the brave soldiers before 
Sebastopol, whom I am proud to call my countrymen, 
have a liking for my ballad on the Charge of the 
Light Brigade at Balaclava, I have ordered a thousand 
copies of it to be printed for them. No writing of 

* In this year Dr. E K. Kane, the Arctic explorer, named a 
columnar rock in Greenland, "Tennyson's Pillar." 



20 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

mine can add to the glory they have acquired in the 
Crimea ; but if what I have heard be true, they will 
not be displeased to receive these copies of the ballad 
from me, and to know that those who sit at home 
love and honour them. 

"August 8, 1855. Alfred Tennyson." 

"The people's voice" was never more distinctly 
heard than in the poetry of Tennyson written in 
times of grave national anxiety. His sympathy with 
popular feeling, as here, aroused by the war in the 
Crimea, was closer and deeper, aristocratic poet 
though he was, than that of any poet of the demo- 
cracy that England has yet seen. 

In May, 1855, the year of the publication of Maud, 

the honorary degree of D.C.L. was conferred on the 

Poet Laureate by the University of Oxford. Of all 

Tennyson's poems, Maud was received 

Maud "^vith the least favour ; it was severely criti- 

and The cised in Blackiiwod (September), and the 

Idylls of JVational Review (October), and a hot con-- 
the King, troversy ensued over its merits and de^ 
merits. An " Anti Maud, by a Poet of the 
People," appeared and ran into a second edition. 
The germ of Maud (as noted above) is to be found in 
the lines, " Oh, that 'twere possible," contributed in 
1837 to the Keepsake, and it is on record that its 
genesis maybe traced to a remark of Sir John Simeon 
(Tennj'son's friend and neighbour), to the effect that 
the lines suggested a story which ought to be more 
fully explained. Be this as it may, the poem was 
mainly composed in Sir John Simeon's garden at 
Swainston. Though the author's favourite poem, 
Maud has never taken firm hold of the popular imagi- 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 21 

nation, and only a few of the more eminent critics have 
spoken enthusiastically in its favour. Chief among 
the charges made against the poem is that of obscurity, 
a charge which can, however, with difficulty be main- 
tained. The best-known vindication of Mai/d, a reply 
to the animadversions of the critics, was published by 
Dr. Mann (1S56), and is of special interest as approved 
by Tennyson himself. In a letter to the author,, Ten- 
nyson wrote : " No one with this essay before him 
can in future pretend to misunderstand my dramatic 
poem, Maud J your commentary is as true as it is 
full." Rightly understood, Maud wiW be taken as a 
proof of the real range and fertility of Tennyson's 
lyric power. More truly dramatic than any of his 
poems composed in the traditional form of the drama, 
it serves to display the character of his genius, which 
was capable of the development of intense individual 
moods such as he could realise in his own person, and 
their presentation in the emphatic form of subtly 
modulated lyric verse. In a monodrama whose 
action unfolds itself in a series of lyric poems, his 
intense individualism was a source of strength, just as 
it was a source of indisputable weakness when he 
afterwards essayed a great dramatic theme in Queen 
Mary and Harold. 

Maud was the poem which the author most fre- 
quently chose to read aloud. Perhaps the most in- 
teresting occasion upon which it was so read was in 
the September of 1855 ; Robert Browning and his 
wife were present, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Ros- 
setti made a pen-and-ink sketch of the poet as he de- 
claimed his verses, which is still preserved. Tenny- 
son is sketched seated on the sofa, in a loose coat. 
His left hand grasps his foot in a curious fashion. 



22 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

and the riglit holds the book. Of Tennyson's read- 
ing, several descriptions have been given. It seems 
to have been a kind of chant, guided by the music of 
the verse rather than by the sense of the words, and in 
this way a striking contrast to Browning's, whose 
stress of voice was not intended to be musical, but 
indicative of the meaning. The contrast is signifi- 
cant as interpreting in the case of each poet his con- 
ception of the aim of his own art. " I rather need to 
know what he is reading," said Sir Henry Taylor of 
Tennyson, " for otherwise I find sense to be lost in 
sound from time to time." 

Two American men of letters have left interesting 
records of their personal impressions of Tennyson 
during 1S57. Bayard Taylor was the poet's guest at 
Farringford, and walked with him over the cliffs to 
the Needles. " I was struck," he wrote, " by the 
variety of his knowledge. Not a little flower on the 
downs escaped his notice, and the geology of the 
coast, both terrestrial and submarine, was perfectly 
familiar to him. I thought of a remark I once heard 
from a distinguished English author (Thackeray), 
that Tennyson w^as the wisest man he knew." Of 
the outward man he spoke as " Tall and broad-shoul- 
dered as a son of Anak, with hair, beard, and eyes of 
Southern darkness."* Hawthorne found the poet 
" as un-English as possible," though not American in 
appearance. " I cannot well describe the difference, 
but there was something more mellow in him, softer, 
sweeter, broader, more simple than we are apt to 
be." t 

It ma}' be noted here that Whittier, a warm ad- 

* Ai Home and Abroad, by Bayard Taylor (London, 1S60). 
\ July 30, 1857. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 23 

mircr of Tcnn3fson's poetry, wrote to him in 1885 to 
ask for some memorial verses for the cenotaph of 
Gordon — a request which produced the well-known 
stanza beginning : 

" Warrior of God, man's friend" — 

Some years later he wrote to Walt Whitman an ac- 
knowledgment of the gift of that poet's photograph : 

" Dear Walt Whitman : I thank you for your 
kind thought of me. I 'value the photograph much, 
and I wish that I could see not only this sun picture, 
excellent as I am told it is, but also the living original. 
May he still live and flourish for many years to be. 
The coming year (1888) should give new life to every 
American who has breathed a breath of that soul 
which inspired the great founders of the American 
Constitution, whose work you are to celebrate. Truly 
the mother country, pondering on this, may feel that 
how much soever the daughter owes to her, she, the 
mother, has nevertheless something to learn from 
the daughter. Especially I would note the care taken 
to guard a noble Constitution from rash and unwise 
innovators." 

This year (1857) saw in print,* though it never was 
published, the first of the series of poems dealing 
with the Arthurian cycle of legends which we now 
possess under the title of The Idylls of the King. For 
long Tennyson's mind had been occupied upon the 
material for poetic treatment lying unused in the an- 
cient British romances. In every volume published 
by him appear traces of their influence upon his 

* F.tiid and Xi III lie ; or, 7'/ie True and tlie False. 



24 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

imagination. The Lady of S/ialott, Sir Galahad, and 
The Morte d' Arthur were pieces of exquisite jewel 
work such as a consummate artist alone could have 
achieved, but they were little more than beautiful 
fragments, and the subject demanded a larger treat- 
ment. Milton's youthful design of an epic poem upon 
King Arthur had never been executed. " King Ar- 
thur," as Dr. Johnson said, " was reserved for another 
fate" — that, namely, of cruel prosing at the hands of 
Sir Richard Blackmore, the valiant author of ineffec- 
tual epics. It was left for a nineteenth-century poet 
to attempt the authentic English epic, the great na- 
tional poem unifying the deeds of the great national 
hero of Britain's legendary age. The development of 
Tennyson's poem was very gradual. In 1859 ap- 
peared Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere in a volume 
of which ten thousand copies were sold within a few 
weeks. At long intervals from this year until 1885, 
the date of Balin and Balan, was built up, book by 
book, the poem of Arthur and the Round Table. An 
expectant but critical audience received the first volume 
with mingled feelings of admiration and disappoint- 
ment. Longfellow wrote in his diary : " Finished the 
four idyls. The first and third {Enid and Elaine) could 
have only come from a great poet. The second and 
fourth ( Vivien and Guinevere) do not seem to me so 
good." Carlyle was more outspoken in his dissatis- 
faction. In a letter to Emerson he wrote : " We read 
at first Tennyson's Idylls with profound recognition 
of the finely elaborated execution, and also of the in- 
ward perfection of vacancy, and, to say truth, with 
considerable impatience at being treated so very like 
infants, though the lollipops were so superlative. 
We gladly changed for one of Emerson's English 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 25 

Traits." Fitzgerald, one of Tennyson's oldest friends, 
shared the disappointment, but for different reasons 
from Carlyle's. Tennyson's poetic progress had been 
in his judgment a deterioration. The early poems, 
Fitzgerald's first love, had been added to indeed, but 
not outshone. Of In Meinoriam, though he spoke 
admiringly, he confessed that for him it had " the 
sense of being evolved by a poetic machine of the 
highest order," and of The Princess he wrote to Fred- 
erick Tennyson : " I am considered a great heretic for 
abusing it ; it seems to me a wretched waste of power 
at a time when a man ought to be doing his best ; and 
I almost feel hopeless about Alfred now — I mean 
about his doing what he was born to do." When the 
Idylls appeared he said : " I wish I had secured more 
leaves from that old ' Butcher's Book' torn up in old 
Spedding's rooms in 1842, when the press went to 
work with, I think, the last of old Alfred's best." 
Without literally endorsing Fitzgerald's mournful 
verdict, the majority of the good critics sorrowed over 
Tennyson's desertion of the field in which his early 
laurels had been reaped for the excursion into epic 
territory, and the regret was even more unanimous 
and widespread when he essayed drama. His repu- 
tation indisputably suffered during these epic and 
dramatic periods, and was not altogether restored 
even by the publication in 1880 of Ballads and Other 
Poems in his seventieth year, described by Theodore 
Watts as " the most richly various volume of English 
poetry that has appeared in this century." 

A personal note in connexion with a passage in The 
Holy Grail may here find a place : 

" Let visions of the night or of the day 

Come as they will ; and many a time they come, 



26 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, 
This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, 
This air that strikes his forehead is not air 
But vision — yea, his very hand and foot — 
In moments when he feels he cannot die, 
And knows himself no vision to himself. 
Nor the high God a vision, nor that One 
Who rose again." 

Here, and, as will be presently noted, elsewhere in 
his poetry Tennyson describes a mental state which 
was one frequently present in his own experience. 
He describes it as follows (May 7, 1874): "I have 
never had any revelations through anaesthetics, but a 
kind of waking trance (this for lack of a better name) 
I have frequently had quite up from my boyhood, 
when I have been all alone. This has often come to 
me through repeating my own name to myself silently, 
till, all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the 
consciousness of my individuality, the individuality 
itself seemed to resolve and fade away into boundless 
being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest 
of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly be- 
yond words, where death was an almost laughable 
impossibility. The loss of personality (if so it were) 
seeming no extinction, but the only true life." 

In The Ancie/it Sage we have an exact reproduction 
of this description in verse : 

" For more than once when I 
Sat all alone, revolving in myself 
The word that is the symbol of myself. 
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed. 
And past into the Nameless, as a cloud 
Melts into Heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs 
Were strange, not mine — and yet no shade of doubt, 
But utter clearness, and thro' loss of self 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 2/ 

The gain of such large life as match'd with ours 
Were sun to spark — unshadowable in words. 
Themselves but shadows of a shadow- world." 

A similar account of trance-like state is quoted by- 
Mr. Knowles from a conversation of Tennyson's : * 
" Sometimes as I sit here alone in this great room I 
get carried away out of sense and body and rapt into 
mere existence, till the accidental touch or movement 
of one of my own fingers is like a great shock and 
blow, and brings the body back with a terrible start." 
With these experiences we may compare that deline- 
ated in the ninety-fifth section of In Memoriam. 

" So word by word, and line by line 

The dead man touch'd me from the past. 
And all at once it seem'd at last 
The living soul was flash'd on mine, 

" And mine in his was wound and whirl'd 
About empyreal heights of thought, 
And came on that which is, and caught 
The deep pulsations of the world." 

In 1859 Tennyson's strong patriotic sentiment once 
more found expression in verse, this time inspired by 
the volunteer movement, the outcome of a period of 
political unrest and the feeling of the necessity of 
provision for national defence. The Times of March 9 
printed The War (best known as Riflemen, Form /), a 
poem known to be by the Laureate, though unac- 
knowledged by him. Tennyson's interest in the vol- 
unteer force was keen and sustained. In 1867 he wrote 
to the late Colonel Richards : " I most heartily con- 
gratulate you on your having been able to do so much 
for your country ; and I hope that you will not cease 

* Aspects of Tennyson, N^inetefnth Century (January, 1893). 



28 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

from your labours until it is the law of the land that 
every man child in it shall be trained to the use of 
arms." 

After the first volume of the Idylls of the King, Ten- 
n5'^son took another new departure in Sea Dreams, 
which, with Enoch Ardcn and Aylmer's Field, is an essay, 
not altogether successful, in decorative treatment of 
subjects taken from modern English life. His extra- 
ordinary versatility — at once a strength and a weak- 
ness — appears in the comparison of these poems with 
Tithonus, contributed at Thackeray's request to Corn- 
hill, the magazine of which he was at the time editor, 
and written in the same year as Sea Dreams. In the 
former we have a faultless rendering of one of the 
most beautiful of the classic myths, deepened and 
widened in its spiritual and moral significance, sub- 
dued in tone yet full of exquisite colour — in short, a 
poem in which Tennyson's genius displays itself in its 
most commanding presence ; in the other, as in Enoch 
Arden, the embroidered splendours of the form only 
serve to belittle or remove into the region of fantastic 
unreality the substance of the poem. 

In 1859, accompanied by his friend, Professor Pal- 
grave, Tennyson visited Portugal, and in 1861 revisit- 
ed the Pyrenees, whither in 1830, with Arthur Hal- 
lam, he had made the enthusiastic revolutionary ex- 
cursion of his youth. It was on this occasion that 
the lines In the Valley of Cauteretz,* commemorating 
that early journey, were composed. In 1S64 Gari- 
baldi was a visitor at Farringford. As a memorial 
of his visit, and at Mrs. Tennyson's request, he 
planted in the grounds, already beautiful with ilex 

* See Remains of Arthur Hugh Clotigh, vol. i., pp. 264-69. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 29 

and cedar, a WcUingtonia gigantea. In the Deinctrr 
volume, Tennyson, in a poem to W. G. Palgrave 
( To Ulysses), makes a graceful reference to the visit 
and the memorial act : 

" Or watch the waving pine which here 
The warrior of Caprera set, 
A name that earth will not forget 
Till Earth has rolled her latest year." 

Except for such visits, occasional journeys abroad, 
and the publication of his poems, the Laureate's long 
life, like that of most men of letters, was a life of un- 
eventful years. In 1867 the even tenour of the 
home at Farringford was exchanged during the sum- 
mer and autumn months for Aldvvorth, a house built 
for the poet from designs by Mr. J. T. Knowles on the 
borders of Sussex, near the village of Haslemere. 
Partly to provide a secluded retreat where, in his in- 
creasing horror of hero-worshippeVs, he niight have a 
certain refuge, and partly for the sake of Mrs. Tenny- 
son's health, the change was made. As the years wore 
on Tennyson bore with decreasing patience the penalty 
of fame, and his dislike of publicity may have had 
something to do with his refusal of a baronetcy offered 
him in 1865. 

The Laureate's contribution about this time to the 
" Eyre Defence Fund" occasioned much popular in- 
dignation. Eyre had entered Louth Grammar School 
shortly after the Tennysons left for Cambridge, and 
had in later life come prominently before the public 
eye by his prompt and decisive suppression of an in- 
surrection among the natives in Jamaica, where he 
was stationed. A charge of wanton cruelty was pre- 
ferred against Eyre by a large and influential body of 



30 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

religious sentimentalists ; and the action of Carlyle, 
Kingsley, Ruskin, and Tennyson in subscribing to a 
fund for his defence produced an almost fierce resent- 
ment. The Laureate's letter on the occasion is of 
more than passing interest: " I sent my small sub- 
scription as a tribute to the nobleness of the man, and 
as a protest against the spirit in which a servant of 
the State, who has saved to us one of the islands of 
the Empire and many English lives, seems to be 
hunted down. In the mean time, the outbreak of our 
Indian Mutiny remains as a warning to all but mad- 
men against want of vigour and swift decisiveness."* 

Of the lesser poems written by Tennyson during 
his epic and dramatic periods, by far the most remark- 
able is Lucretius. I am not sure that the poet's high- 
est reach is not attained in this, the most splendid of 
his masterly studies of classical subjects. No other 
poem displays his best qualities in such powerful 
combination, in such flawless perfection. Admirably 
balanced, magnificent in its metrical movement, and in 
its final version closed by perhaps the most dramatic 
touch in all Tennyson's poetry, it marks in my judg- 
ment the high-water mark of his achievement. 
Among his other poems there may be found some to 
equal, none, I think, to surpass it. 

In 1868 Henry Wads worth Longfellow visited 
Tennyson at Farringford, whither the most distin- 
guished visitors to England now made a pilgrimage. 
An account of an expedition to the newly built and 
inaccessible Aldworth, made about this time by a 
party of guests, is given by Lord Houghton, one of 
their number : 

* Life of E. J. Eyre, late Governor of Jamaica, by Hamilton 
Hume. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 3 1 

" Our expedition to Tennyson's was a moral suc- 
cess, but a physical failure ; for we had so bad a pair 
of posters that we regularly knocked up seven miles 
from the house, and should have had to walk there in 
the moonlight, if we had not met with a London cab. 
The bard was very agreeable, and his wife and son 
delightful. He has built himself a very handsome 
and commodious house in a most inaccessible site, 
with every comfort he can require, and every discom- 
fort to all who approach him. What can be more 
poetical ?" 

That in his poetry he had built himself an imper- 
ishable monument was never, it seems, a settled con- 
viction in Tennyson's mind. He was often visited by 
doubts regarding the enduring quality 
of his poetical achievement. Looking on The Dramas, 
one occasion at Aldworth, in company with 
its architect, Mr. Knovvles, he said, " That house will 
last longer than I shall. It will last five hundred 
years." Ambitious to try his hand in the highest de- 
partment of literature, and uncertain how the work 
already done might fare at the hands of time, Tenny- 
son, led by the irony of fate, gave up some of the 
best years of his life to the composition of dramatic 
poetry, to which his genius cannot be said to have in- 
clined him, and in which he certainly attained no 
crown of lavish praise. Fine as are occasional pas- 
sages and dramatic as are many of the scenes in 
Queen Alary, Harold, and Becket, these plays are es- 
sentially poems upon which a dramatic form has been 
impressed, but impressed unconvincingly. Neither 
in action nor in presentation of character are we 
persuaded that they are dramatically conceived. 

Queen Mary was produced at the Lyceum in April, 



32 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

1876, Mr. Henry Irving taking the part of Philip, 
and Miss Bateman that of the Queen. In spite of the 
excellence of the stage management, the representa- 
tion was a failure. Harold, in some respects a play of 
better construction for stage purposes, although abso- 
lutely inferior as poetry, followed, but in published 
form only, and has never been acted. 

But in the very hour of his failure as a dramatist 
Tennyson was engaged upon poems which were to" 
prove how great an error he made in deserting the 
field best suited to his genius, and how much greater 
was the error of the critics who saw visible decline 
writ large upon his later work. " Eh ! he has got the 
grip of it," cried Carlyle when the ballad of The 
Revenge was read to him ; and many another friend, 
dissatisfied with the epic and the dramas, rejoiced 
over the marvellous virility of the verse collected in 
the volume entitled Ballads and Other Poems of 1880. 
This book was the first sign of the gorgeous Indian 
summer which was to diffuse its golden splendours 
•over the remainder of Tennyson's career, and to end 
only with his life. For his genius there lay in wait 
no "winter of pale misfeature." 

In April, 1879, Charles Tennyson Turner* died. At 
Grasby, where he had been rector, he left behind him 
many affectionate memories, and to the world of 
letters a reputation not indeed of such far-shining 
brilliance as his brother, but of tender and enduring 
ray. A collected edition of his poems, with Alfred's 
prefatory memorial lines " At Midnight," was pub- 
lished in the year following that of his death. Fred- 
erick, the eldest of this poetic brotherhood, still lives, 

* The name " Turner" was taken under the will of a relation. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 33 

the author of many poems which, bearing any name 
but that of Tennyson, might have made the name 
illustrious. 

In The Falcon, produced by Mr. and Mrs. Kendal at 
St. James's Theatre (December, 1879), the Laureate 
again essayed success as a dramatist, this time with a 
vastly less ambitious play ; a mere graceful poetic set- 
ting of a plot from Boccaccio, the ninth novel of the 
fifth day of his Decameron. The Falcon, too, like its 
predecessors, failed, and it was not until the produc- 
tion at the Lyceum by Mr. Irving in January, 1881, of 
The Cup that success rewarded Tennyson's persever- 
ing efforts in the dramatic form. This play owed its 
public favour in some degree to the actors and to the 
management under which it was produced in a style 
of profuse magnificence. 

In 1880 Tennyson was invited to become a candi- 
date for the Lord Rectorship of the University of 
Glasgow, but declined the honour of a nomination on 
hearing that he was to be the candidate of the Con- 
servative Party, in the following terms : " I only 
consented to stand for your Lord Rectorship when 
informed by the letter of introduction which your 
agreeable deputation brought, that my nomination 
was 'supported by a large majority, if not the total- 
ity of the students of Glasgow.' It now seems neces- 
sary that I should, by standing at your invitation, 
appear, what I have steadfastly refused to be — a party 
candidate for the Conservative Club. . . . You are 
probably aware that some years ago the Glasgow 
Liberals asked me to be their candidate, and that I, 
in like manner, declined ; yet I would gladly accept a 
nomination, after what has occurred on this occasion, 
if at any time a body of students, bearing no political 



34 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

party name, should wish to nominate me, or if both 
Liberals and Conservatives should ever happen to 
agree in foregoing the excitement of a political con- 
test, and in desiring a Lord Rector who would not 
appear for installation, and who would, in fact, be a 
mere roi faineant, with nothing but the literary merits 
you are good enough to appreciate." 

The note struck by Tennyson in the Ballads and 
Other Poems was a fuller, richer, deeper note than had 
yet been heard in his poetry. The voice that spoke 
in it was a manlier voice. The dreamy melody of the 
verse of his youth had given place to a more strenu- 
ous music and themes of graver human interest. 
Had his career closed before 1880, it might fairly 
have been said of him that he had given the best he 
had to give, that nothing more was to be expected. 
There is not, I think, in the history of literature so 
signal an example of poetic power steadily advancing 
in strength and compass through so long a life, and 
until its very close. Or if there be, to find a par- 
allel we shall need to journey far : Tennyson is 
only matched by Sophocles. 

In 1882, under the direction of Mrs. Bernard Beere, 
The Promise of May, Tennyson's fifth drama — a prose 
one this time — was produced at the Globe Theatre, 
and proved a dismal failure. It was popularly though 
wrongly supposed* that, in the character of ' Edgar,' 
Tennyson intended to pourtray the ordinary agnostic, 
and the portrait was regarded as unnecessarily insult- 
ing. Much excitement was caused on the fourth 
night of the representation by an interruption from 

* In a letter to Mr. Hall Caine, Tennyson wrote : " I meant 
Edgar to be a shallow enough theorist. I never could have thought 
that he would have been taken for an ' ordinary freethinker.' " 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 35 

the Marquis of Queensberry, who rose in the theatre 
and exclaimed, " I am an agnostic, and I protest 
against Mr. Tennyson's gross caricature of our 
creed." 

The transient decline in popularity produced by 
this play and by the general ill success of Tennyson's 
dramas, was increased when, on his return from a 
yachting cruise to Copenhagen with Mr. Gladstone, 
he accepted a peerage. The Poet-Peer's attendance 
at the debates in the House of Lords was very rare ; 
on one occasion he took part in a division, voting for 
a measure in extension of the franchise ; on another 
he paired in favour of the " Deceased Wife's Sister" 
bill. 

The Laureate's sixth drama, Becket, was published 
in 1884. It is pleasing to record the graceful act of 
courtesy done his old friend, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, in 
connexion with its composition. " He would not 
write it," says Mr. de Vere in a private letter, "till he 
ascertained from me (my Thoinas of Canterbury had 
been published a few years earlier) that, so far from 
being annoyed at his writing on the same great man, 
I should much rejoice at it." 

Of the remaining years of Tennyson's life there is 
little for the unofficial biographer to record save the 
publication of successive volumes of a veteran poet's 
verse, which never lost its charm, while it grew in 
power and drew at last to an almost tri- 
umphant close. It is good to think that „ ^ 
^ . ^ . . Years. 

Tennyson, like Shakespere, in his latest 

work delivered a message of hope to the human race, 
a message even prophetic in its tone of deep and sol- 
emn assurance. The Tiresias volume (1885), fitly 
dedicated to Robert Browning, contained among 



36 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

many noble and striking poems one in particular, 
The Ancient Sage, which, to me at least, seems to sum 
up all that is noblest and best in the life-teaching of 
Tennyson. 

It is of interest to note that in this year he ex- 
pressed his opinion in very definite language of the 
proposal to disestablish the English State Church. 
" I believe," he wrote, " that the disestablishment and 
disendowment of the Church would prelude the down- 
fall of much that is greatest and best in England."* 
Tennyson was given to expressing his opinions 
strongly and with no uncertain note. When the news 
of the persecution of the Russian Jews reached Eng- 
land in 1891, " I can only say," he wrote, "that Russia 
has disgraced her church and her nationality. I once 
met the Czar. He seemed a kind and good-natured 
man. I can scarcely believe that he is fully aware of 
the barbarities perpetrated with his apparent sanction." 

In 1886 Lionel Tennyson died on his voyage home 
from fever contracted in India, where he had been as a 
member of the Viceroy's staff. His death was the one 
great trial of the poem's declining years, and is the 
main theme of the pathetic poem dedicating the De- 
mefer volume (1889) to the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava. 

" For he — your India was his Fate, 
And drew him over sea to you — 
He fain had ranged her thro' and thro' 
To serve her myriads and the State. 
* * * * * * 

" But while my life's late eve endures, 
Nor settles into hueless grey, 
My memories of his briefer day 
Will mix with love for you and yours." 

* Letter to Mr. Bdsworth Smith. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 37 

Among the visitors to Farringford and Haslemere 
during the last years of Tennyson's life were his old 
friends, the Duke of Argyll, Professor Jowett, and Mr. 
Theodore Watts, and from across the Atlantic jour- 
neyed a welcome guest in Oliver Wendell Holmes. 
Just before his own death in December, 1889, Brown- 
ing wrote his last letter to Tennyson on the occasion 
of the Laureate's eightieth birthday : 

" My dear Tennyson : To-morrow is your birthday, 
indeed a memorable one. Let me say I associate my- 
self with the universal pride of our country in your 
glory, and in its hope that for many and many a year 
we may have your very self among us — secure that 
your poetry will be a wonder and delight to all those 
appointed to come after. And for my own part, let 
me further say, I have loved you dearly. May God 
bless you and yours." 

Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), in which the 
author returned to the theme of his youth, possesses an 
interest of a somewhat different order from that of the 
other later volumes in that it presents the same mind 
that produced the early Locksley Hall, moving among 
the same surroundings altered by time, and thus 
at once marks a contrast and emphasises a develop- 
ment. If the two poems are read side by side, the 
characteristics of Tennyson's youthful and decorative 
art are sharply distinguishable from those of his 
maturer, enlarged, and reflective poetry. The early 
poem betrays an intellectual slightness and a music 
thin by comparison with the impassioned depth and 
sincerity, the ample volume of the later. The one is 
governed by the egoistic passion of the boy, the other 
by the altruistic temper of the sage. 



38 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Versatile and graceful to the last, even in fields re- 
mote from that of his power, he published in 1892 his 
last drama, The Foresters, a romantic pastoral play, 
which achieved a brilliant success when produced by 
Mr. Daly in New York, with Miss Ada Rehan as 
Maid Marian. Sherwood Forest, Robin Hood, Maid 
Marian, and the life under the greenwood tree must 
have conveyed something of the charm of English 
country life in the olden time to American audiences, 
whose ancestors' life indeed it was. 

But the harp from whose magic strings flowed the 
ever-varying, ever-melodious music that had seemed 
in English ears the sweetest of its time, was soon to 
be silent. In the autumn of 1892, but a few weeks 
before the publication of The Death of Qifione and 
Akbars Dream, rumours were heard of the poet's ill- 
ness, and on October 6, before dawn, but in a room 
flooded with the quiet moonlight, the end came. He 
was buried among his peers and beside his friend, 
Robert Browning, in Poets' Corner, Westminster 
Abbey. 



CHAPTER II. 

In the spring of 1827, Charles and Alfred Tenny- 
son were partners in a literary venture. The preface 
to the volume, which had for motto the line from 

Martial, 

" Hsec nos novimus esse nihil," 

stated that the " poems were written from the ages 
of fifteen to eighteen, not conjointly, but 
individually." In Messrs. Macmillan's "poems 
edition of 1893 the preface by Hallam, by Two 
Lord Tennyson, contains the further in- Brothers," 
formation obtained from his father that he 1827. 
(Alfred) was between fifteen and seventeen 
when the poems were written, his brother Charles 
between fifteen and eighteen, and that four poems 
now signed " F. T." were by Frederick Tennyson, 
the eldest brother. In this latter edition the initials, 
supplied by Frederick Tennyson, of the supposed 
authors, either "A. T." or " C. T.," are appended to 
each of the poems, but we are warned that there is 
no certainty as to the authorship in individual cases.* 
Without the help of the initials, however, and despite 
the fact that the music now familiar as Tennysonian 
is nowhere to be heard in the book, there is little 
difficulty in determining the work of each author. 

* Some additional poems are for the first time printed in this 
edition. They belonged to the original MS. of 1827, but were 
omitted for some forgotten reason. 



40 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

After one perusal I was struck by the fact that the 
moVe ambitious poems are the work of one hand, and 
that hand is proved to be Alfred's by the occasional 
phrases to be met with which appear again in his 
later poetry — as, for example, in this volume, in the 
poem entitled Egypt, occur these lines: 

" The first glitter of his rising beam 

Falls on the broad-based pyramids sublime;" 

and in A Fragment, published by Alfred in the Gem 
in 1830, these occur : 

" Yet endure unscathed 
Of changeful cycles, the great Pyramids 
Broad-based a.vaid the fleeting sands." 

And here in Oriaiia the lines, 

" Winds were blowing, waters flowing. 
We heard the steeds to battle going, 

Oriana ; 
Aloud the hollow bugle blowing, 
Oriana," 

echo a similar movement in the Vale of Bones : 

" When on to battle proudly going, 
Your plumage to the wild winds blowing. 
Your tartans far behind ye flowing." 

I have noticed a number of these similarities and 
resemblances, and think it would be no difficult task 
to pick out with tolerable certainty the poems by 
Alfred from among the one hundred and two poems 
of which the volume is composed. The vein of feel- 
ing in Charles's poems is more tranquil, more domes- 
tic, and the themes chosen far less difficult. Alfred is 
the bolder adventurer, and ranges further in his search 
for subjects. His work seems to express a more de- 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. ^ 4I 

liberate determination to be poetic, and effort is more 
distinctly characteristic of his contributions to the book 
than those of Charles, which may be unhesitatingly 
described as by comparison spontaneous and natural. 
It may at once be said that there is no mark of distinc- 
tion, no promise of future greatness in these poems. 
They are rather, indeed, remarkable for the absence 
of the puerility one might naturally expect to be some- 
where betrayed in a series of such youthful efforts, 
than by any positive qualities. Many of the poems 
written by Alfred Tennyson in later years, such as, for 
example, The Skipping-Rope or The English War Song 
(of 1830), reach a lower deep of inanity than any 
printed in this first volume. For the rest an ac- 
quaintance with the poetry of the world such as 
few schoolboys can boast is plentifully exhibited in 
the mottoes prefixed to most of the verses. The 
Latin poets, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, are laid under 
contribution ; Milton, Gray, Byron, Scott, and Moore 
among English poets ; and occasional prose authors 
are represented — in short, a goodly company — among 
which, of course, the English writers, and Byron in 
particular, predominate. The boys, and it is signifi- 
cant when we attempt to fix for ourselves the place 
which the future will assign to Alfred Tennyson — the 
boys were cradled into poetry by the best poets of 
the world. The determination to be poets preceded 
any true poetic faculty, and in Alfred's case we must 
regard that determination, leading as it did to life- 
long, indefatigable labour in the effort to obtain an 
artist's command over his medium, an artist's mastery 
in technique, as in large measure the power which, 
joined with the true poetic vision of later years, made 
him the poet he eventually became. 



42 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

The versification and metrical movement of this 
early verse are, of course, entirely derivative ; Byron's 
Hebrew Melodies and Moore's Irish Melodies supply 
much of the inspiration. The boys had indeed, as 
Coleridge said of Alfred, " begun to write poetry 
without very well understanding what metre was," 
and this volume is composed of a series of imita- 
tive metrical essays. Imitative they are, however, 
in a catholic spirit, no one model being exclusively 
followed. 

The only notice of the book in which the brothers 
" crossed the Rubicon" together, as they expressed it 
in the preface, appeared in The Literary Chronicle and 
Weekly Revieio (May 19, 1827), "This little volume," 
remarked the writer, "exhibits a pleasing union of 
kindred tastes, and contains several little pieces of 
considerable merit." 

In the first year of his Cambridge residence Tenny- 
son was a candidate for the Chancellor's Medal in 
English Verse — the subject Timbuctoo. Among his 
rivals were Monckton Milnes and Arthur 
Timbuctoo Hallam. Hallam's poem, composed in the 
and the terza rima of Dante, may be read in the 
" Poems" of volume of his Remains in Verse and Prose, 
1830. published in 1834. Tennyson's poem is 
now accessible in Messrs. Macmillan's edi- 
tion of Poems by Tivo Brothers, to which it forms a 
natural conclusion. The exercises were submitted 
to the University Examiners in April, and upon June 
12, 1829, the following announcement appeared in 
the Cambridge Chronicle and Journal: "On Saturday 
last the Chancellor's Gold Medal for the best English 
poem by a resident undergraduate was adjudged 
to Alfred Tennyson, of Trinity College." This 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 43 

is the first public mention of the name of Alfred 
Tennyson in connexion with poetry. In the AtJiciKZum 
of July 22, a very flattering notice of the prize poem 
appeared. "We have accustomed ourselves," wrote 
the reviewer (perhaps John Sterling or Frederick 
Maurice, at that time the joint editors), "to think, 
perhaps without any very good reason, that poetry 
was likely to perish among us for a considerable 
period after the great generation of poets which is 
now passing away. The age seems determined to 
contradict us, and that in the most decided manner ; 
for it has put forth poetry by a young man, and that 
where we should least expect it — namely, in a prize 
poem. These productions have often been ingenious 
and elegant, but we have never before seen one of 
them which indicated really first-rate poetical genius, 
and which would have done honour to any man that 
ever wrote. Such, we do not hesitate to affirm, is the 
little work before us ; and the examiners seem to 
have felt it like ourselves, for they have assigned the 
prize to its author, though the measure in which he 
writes was never before, we believe^ thus selected for 
honour." The measure here referred to was blank 
verse, a bold experiment on Tennyson's part, the 
traditions being all in favour of the heroic couplet. 
I have little doubt, however, that, so far from attenu- 
ating his chance of success by his choice of metre, 
Tennyson really increased it ; the novelty of the 
measure calling attention to and emphasizing the 
novelty of method and manner conspicuous in the 
poem. Without echoing the high praise of the 
AthencEui/i reviewer, it is not too much to say that 
Timbuctoo is a very remarkable prize exercise, vague 
indeed in its general conception and purpose, but 



44 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

indisputably original ; the first English poem to 
mark the direction in which the richly decorative 
art of Keats was to find its development. Written 
very shortly after the Poems by Two Brot/iers, it is a 
surprising advance in poetic technique. The ob- 
viously imitative measures of his boyhood poems 
are forgotten, and Tennyson has found himself. The 
music is the familiar music that we associate with 
his name — 

" Where are ye, 

Thrones of the Western wave, fair Islands green? 

Where are your moonlight halls, your cedarn glooms, 

The blossoming abysses of your hills ? 

Your flowering capes, and your gold-sanded bays, 

Blown round with happy airs of odorous winds ?" 

The inspiration here, as indeed throughout, is es- 
sentially Keats ; read Hyperion and you have traced 
this manner to its fount. The influence of Words- 
worth, traceable in some of his later poems, is not yet 
visible, nor was there anything either of Wordsworth, 
the revealer, or Wordsworth, the unconscious artist, 
grand in the bare simplicity of his style, in Tennyson 
at any period of his poetic history. They may be 
taken as representatives of methods in poetry mu- 
tually exclusive. If Wordsworth was a great poet, he 
was a great poet by reason of his revelation, by 
reason of the truth and the beauty of his thought 
when it crystallised in a perfect and inevitable be- 
cause a quietly natural form of expression. If Tenny- 
son was a great poet, it was because, like Pope, he 
could set forth a philosophy and adorn a pathetic 
tale in a more graceful and more appropriate key of 
words than any man of his time ; and, what Pope 
could not do, give lyric expression to intense individ- 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 45 

ual moods with almost the passionate power of Burns, 
and an intellectual precision not at all times attained 
by Shelley. Essentially a lyrist, and original only in 
his presentation of his own moods or states of feel- 
ing, Tennyson, when he travelled beyond the range 
of his own experience, was a scholarly and accomplish- 
ed versifier, a later Pope, who from among the ideas 
current at the time selected the best, and gave them 
out again in his own elegant and exquisite version. 
Difficile est proprie commit nia die ere. 

The rich and dreamy melodies, the alternate lan- 
guor and swiftness of emotion, and the subtleties of 
its delineation, displayed in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, at 
once exercised a fascination over the sensitive tem- 
peraments of the young men who were readers of 
poetry in 1S30. Verse like this, from the first poem 
in the volume, Claribel, was a source of new and de- 
lightful sensations : 

" At eve the beetle boometh 

Athwart the thicket lone : 
At noon the wild bee hummeth 

About the moss'd headstone ; 
At midnight the moon cometh, 

And looketh down alone. 
Her song the lintwhite swelleth, 
The clear-voiced mavis dwelleth. 

The callow throstle lispeth, 
The slumbrous wave outwelleth. 

The babbling runnel crispeth, 
The hollow grot replieth 

Where Claribel low lieth."* 

* In Henry Alford's journal there are some interesting refer- 
ences to the brothers Tennyson. Referring to Alfred's " Poems" 
of 1S30, and Charles's Sonnets and Fugitive Pieces, published the 
same year, he wrote : 

"Oct. 12, 1830. Looked over both the Tennysons' Poems at 



46 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

It was a new departure in English poetry ; there 
had been nothing like it before ; and although the in- 
tellectual equipment of the author, so far as revealed 
in the poetry, was really of the slightest, and although 
some of the poems were hardly worthy of a place in any 
printed book, curiosity and admiration were aroused, 
and an interest excited in the personality of the new 
poet. The best and most characteristic poems in this 
volume were Claribcl, Mariana, Isabel, Adeline, Oria/ia, 
The Dying Swan, A Character, The Poet, The Poet's 
Mind, and Circumstance. There were fifty-three poems 
in all, of which almost half (twenty-five) were after- 
wards suppressed, a few being restored to places in the 
collected editions of later life. The following is a list of 
the suppressed poems : Elegiacs ; The How and the Why ; 
Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind not 
in Unity with Itself ; The Burial of Love j To Juliet j Songs 
(three) ; Heroto Leander ; The Mystic ; The Grasshopper ; 
Love, Pride, and Forgetfulness ; Chorus in an Unpublished 
Drama, written very early ; Lost Hope ; The Tears of 
Heaven ; Love and Sorrow ; To a Lady Sleeping ; Sonnets ; 
Love ; The Kraken j English War Song ; National Song j 
Dualisms J We are Eree,oi piovrsi. Tennyson's judg- 
ments on his own poems, unlike those of Wordsworth, 
were almost unerring, and, as a consequence, the inces- 
sant revision to which his work was subjected rarely 
failed to be happily effective. How finely some of his 
poems were retouched may here be illustrated by per- 

night ; exquisite fellows. I know no two books of poetry which 
have given me so much pure pleasure as their works ;" and again 
later : 

" Met Tennant, Hallam, Merivale, and the three Tennysons at 
Alfred Tennyson's rooms. The latter read some very exquisite 
poetry of his, entitled Anacaoiia and T/w IlisperiJcs. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 47 

haps the palmary example. In its first version, the 
closing line of Lucretius read : 

" What matters ? All is over : Fare thee well" 

—a line weak in itself, and weaker as the conclusion of 
BO matchless and dramatic a reproduction of the clas- 
sic story. In its later form the last words of Lucre- 
tius catch up in questioning echo his wife's despairing 
cry " as having failed in duty to him," and once again 
the unsolved problem of his philosophic life shapes it- 
self anew, the ruling passion strong even in violent 
and untimely death : 

"Thy duty? What is duty ? Fare thee well !" 

The Poems of 1S30 were praised by Hallam and 
Leigh Hunt, but severely handled by Christopher 
North in Blackwood. So far there had been no unanim- 
ity among the critics as to the rank to be assigned 
the representative of the new school of 
poetry. At the same time, it was evident The "Poems" 
that the younger generation was in his of 1832. 
favour, and in 1S32 Tennyson put forth 
another volume of lyrics in which the distinctive char- 
acteristics of his style were still more strongly marked. 
Hallam's criticism^" the author imitates nobody" — 
made in his reviewof the 1830 Poems in the English- 
mail's Magazine^ was even more strictly true of this 
second volume. Subtly indefinite as many of the 
pieces were, the very absence of definite meaning lent 
them the magic of suggestiveness which captivated 
many minds. " I am not sure," wrote Edgar Allan 
Poe, " that Tennyson is not the greatest of poets. . . . 
There are passages in his works which rivet a convic- 
tion I had long entertained, that the indefinite is an 
element in the true 7roii]GiZ. Why do some persons 



48 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

fatigue themselves in endeavours to unravel such phan- 
tasy pieces as The Lady of Shalott ? As well unweave 
the xjcntum textilcm. If the author did not deliberately 
propose to himself a suggestive indefiniteness of mean- 
ing, with the view of bringing about a definiteness of 
vague and therefore of spiritual effect — this, at least 
arose from the silent analytical promptings of that 
poetic genius which, in its supreme development, em- 
bodies all orders of intellectual capacity."* In that mu- 
sical dream, T/ie Lady of S/ialott,\ in the subtile mod- 

* New York Democratic RcvicLi), December, 1844. 
•j- The original version of this poem differs from the final in 
sixty or seventy lines. The following was the concluding stanza 
in the early edition : 

" They crossed themselves, their stars they blest, 
Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest ; 
There lay a parchment on her breast. 
That puzzled more than all the rest 
The well-fed wits at Camelot. 
' The web was woven curiously, 
The charm is broken utterly ; 
Draw near and fear not, this is I, 
The Lady of Shalott.' " 
How Tennyson could polish a pebble until it becam^ a gem is 
nowhere better illustrated than by a comparison of this with the 
following stanza : 

" Who is this ? and what is here ? 
And in the lighted palace near 
Died the sound of royal cheer ; 
And they cross 'd themselves for fear. 

All the knights at Camelot : 
But Lancelot mused a little space ; 
He said, ' She has a lovely face ; 
God in his mercy lend her grace. 
The Lady of Shalott.'" 

Shalott is a form of Astolat. The poem was suggested by an 
Italian romance — Donna Ji Scalotia. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 49 

ulation, the harmonies and cadences of The Lotos- 
Eaters,^ in the finely drawn portraits of The Dream of 
Fair Women., and especially in the highly wrought 
beauty and deep moral significance of the allegory 
presented in The Palace of Art, indisputable evidences 
of original genius were displayed. It was impossible 
to receive this body of poetry in contemptuous silence ; 
it was difficult to withhold from it a meed of respect. 
But the casquet which held these jewels contained 
some spurious and many faulty brilliants. And in 
the Quarterly of July, 1833, a full and cruel but, in 
many respects, admirable review of Tennyson's poetry 
proceeded with caustic irony " to point out," as the 
writer said, " the peculiar brilliancy of some of the 
gems that irradiate his poetical crown." The indig- 
nation of Tennyson-worshippers against the author 
of this critique has never slept, but in my judg- 
ment it may be justly claimed not only as the most 
effective, but in the poet's own interest the most 
valuable review ever written. The supreme excel- 
lence of Tennyson's poetry, if it can be said to re- 
side in any one quality, resides in its flawless per- 
fection of finish. Had Tennyson not been a great, al- 
most a faultless artist, he would have been a poet of 
inconsiderable rank. He became such an artist, as 
has already been remarked, by assiduous culture of 
rare native talent, and the criticism of the Quarterly 
showed the young author the indispensable necessity 
of even sterner artistic governance and stricter self- 
discipline. Lockhart, for there is little doubt as to 
the authorship of the article, was a severe critic, but 
his severity bore fruit where extravagant praise or in- 
dulgent partiality would have proved less than barren. 

* Founded on a passage in Odyssey. (Bk. ix. 82 seq.) 



50 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Some of the pieces which drew forth his sarcastic com- 
ments were omitted from future editions, and almost all 
were altered or rewritten in respect of the censured 
passages.* The following poems were dropped in the 
next collected edition. Five Sonnets (" Mine be the 
strength of spirit fierce and free ;" " O Beauty, pass- 
ing beauty ! sweetest sweet !" " Blow ye the trumpet, 
gather from afar ;" " How long, O God, shall men be 
ridden down ;" " As when with downcast eyes we 

muse and brood") ; Lines " To ;" TJic Hesperides ; 

Rosalind ; Songs — Who can Say ; O Darling Room ; Lines 
"To Christopher North ;" Kate. In the first edition of 
T/ie Palace of Art, many passages appeared which were 
struck out of all subsequent editions, and four stanzas 
descriptive of two statues in the palace were appended 
to the poem with a note, together with the following 
fine verses descriptive of a tower for astronomical ob- 
servation : 

" Hither, when all the deep unsounded skies 

Were shuddering with silent stars, she clomb, 
And, as with optic glasses, her keen eyes 

Pierced through the mystic dome. 
" Regions of lucid matter taking forms, 

Brushes of fire, hazy gleams. 
Clusters and beds of worlds, and bee-like swarms 

Of suns and starry streams. 
" She saw the snowy poles of moonless Mars, 

That marvellous round of milky light 
Below Orion, and those double stars 

Whereof the one more bright 

" Is circled by the other." 
" In this poem," wrote Lockhart, " we first observed 
4 stroke of art which we think very ingenious. No 

* Compare the first with the later editions of lite Millo's 
Daughter. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 5 1 

one who has ever written verses but must have felt the 
pain of erasing some happy line, some striking phrase, 
which, however excellent in itself, did not exactly suit 
the place for which it was destined. How curiously 
does an author mould and remould the plastic verse 
in order to fit in the favourite thought ; and when he 
finds that he cannot introduce it, as Corporal Trim 
says, anyhow, with what reluctance does he at last re- 
ject the intractable but still cherished offspring of his 
brain ! Mr. Tennyson manages this delicate matter in 
a new and better way. He says with great candour and 
simplicity, ' If this poem were not already too long, / 
should have added the following stanzas,' and then he adds 
them J or, ' I intended to have added something on 
statuary, but I found it very difficult ; but I have fin- 
ished the statues of Elijah and Olympias ; judge 
whether I have succeeded ; ' and th.e.n we have those two 
statues. This is certainly the most ingenious device 
that has ever come under our observation for recon- 
ciling the rigour of criticism with the indulgence of 
parental partiality." Another comment of Lockhart's 
may be quoted. The early version of the Dream of 
Fair Women contained these lines in the description of 
Iphigenia's sacrifice : 

" One drew a sharp knife through my slender throat ; 
Slowly, and nothing more." 

" What touching simplicity," remarked the reviewer, 
" what pathetic resignation — he cut my throat — 
^nothing morel' One might indeed ask what more 
she would have ?"* 

* The lines now stand as follows — 

" The bright death quiver'd at the victim's throat ; 
Touch'd ; and I knew no more." 



52 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

In April, 1833, Coleridge, than whom no subtler 
musician in words has ever written verse, wrote of these 
early poems as follows : " I have not read through all 
Mr. Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to me, 
but I thini<. there are some things of a good deal of 
beauty in that I have seen. The misfortune is that he 
has begun to write verses without very well under- 
standing what metre is. Even if you write in a known 
and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a 
metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious 
verses ; but to deal in new metres without considering 
what metre means and requires is preposterous. 
What I would, with many wishes of success, prescribe 
to Tennyson — indeed without it he can never be a 
poet in art — is to write for the next two or three years 
in none but one or two well-known and strictly defined 
metres, such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, 
or the octosyllabic measure of the Allegro and Pense- 
roso. He would probably thus get imbued with a 
sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, 
just as Eton boys get to write good Latin verses by 
conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is, I can scarcely 
scan his verses."* How is this criticism of Coleridge's 
to be interpreted ? To censure the author of The 
Lotos-Eaters^ The Palace of Art, and CEiwne as deficient 
in a knowledge of what metre was excites surprise, 
and were any other than Coleridge the critic, would 
excite derision no less. Yet Coleridge is in a sense 
right. Tennyson, more especially in his earlier poems, 
was a melodist rather than a metrist. He aimed at 
musical effects, at sound-effects only perfectible for 
the human ear through some more plastic medium 

* Table- Talk of S. T. Coleridge, vol. ii., p. 164. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 53 

than language. The human voice may be regarded as 
a perfect instrument of limited range, but as the 
organ of articulate speech it is at once ennobled and 
degraded — ennobled as the servant of the rational 
soul, degraded as a musical instrument. Language- 
less emotion it may adequately render, as the harp or 
violin render it ; intellectual precision, only attain- 
able in some articulate tongue, is incompatible with 
the freedom of its chords, essential for the production 
of the purely musical effects attainable through- other 
mediums.* 

For ten years after the publication of the 1832 poems 
Tennyson published no volume of verse. When at 
length he broke silence, it was to take assured rank 
among English poets. " If anything were to happen 
to Tennyson," said Elizabeth Barrett, " the 
world should go into mourning." The first Poems of 
of the two volumes published in 1842 was i^**. In 
mainly composed of poems which had al- 
ready appeared in the previous collected 
editions of 1830 and 1832, the second of poems, with 
one or two exceptions, entirely new. Of the reprinted 
pieces some were practically re-written and many were 

* Edgar Allan Poe, writing in the New York Democratic Review 
(December, 1844), notices in Tennyson the absence of strict regard 
to metre. " His shorter pieces abound in minute rhythmical lapses 
— sufficient to assure me that, in common with all poets, living or 
dead, he has neglected to make precise investigation of the prin- 
ciples of metre ; but, on the other hand, so perfect is his rhyth- 
mical instinct in general, that he seems to see with his ear." It were 
more correct, I believe, to say that he attempts to reproduce a 
melody correctly heard by the ear, but disorganized when set to 
words— that is, only imperfectly reproduced; hence the rhythmical 
lapses; hence, too, the inapplicability of ordinary metrical prin- 
ciples. 



54 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

amended. The attempt to chronicle the alterations 
made by Tennyson in his poetry, even after it was 
made public, would in itself require a volume. It will 
suffice to remark that up to the last the successive 
editions invariably contained changes, many, indeed, 
slight or verbal, but no less indicative of the scrupu- 
lous and incessant attention bestowed upon his work. 
Take as one example these lines, the opening of 
QLnoue in the 1832 volume : 

" There is a dale in Ida, lovelier 
Than any in Ionia, beautiful 
With emerald slopes of sunny sward, that lean 
Above the loud glen river, which hath worn 
A path thro' steep-down* granite walls below 
Mantled with flowering tendril twine." 

This might have been written by any one, but in 
1842 it had been through the refiner's hands again, and 
emerged pure Tennysonian : 

" There is a vale in Ida, lovelier . 

Than all the valleys of Ionian hills. 
The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen. 
Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine. 
And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand 
The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down 
Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars 
The long brook falling thro' the clov'n ravine 
In cataract after cataract to the sea." 

When Monckton Milnes, on behalf of Tennyson's 
friends, represented to Sir Robert Peel, then Prime 
Minister, that the poet's name be placed upon the 
civil list for a pension, he sent him a copy of these 

* Tennyson's authorities are always classic : 

" Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire." 

• —Othello. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 55 

poems, marking Ulysses and Lockslcy Hall. Of all his 
poems probably the latter has gained the widest ap- 
preciation. Its colour and picturesqueness, the fresh- 
ness of its treatment of a simple and familiar theme, 
and the lively movement of its trochaic measure won 
for it instant popularity. In a copy of the first edi- 
tion, originally possessed by Mr. R. W. Proctor, the 
following verses appear in manuscript after the nine- 
teenth couplet : 

" In the hall there hangs a painting, Amy's arms are round my 
neck, 
Happy children in a sunbeam, sitting on the ribs of wreck. 

" In my life there is a picture : she that clasped my neck is flown, 
I am left within the shadow, sitting on the wreck alone." 

These lines serve to connect this poem with the 
Locksley Hall of Sixty Years After, as they appear in 
the later poem after the sixth couplet. Several of the 
readings of the first edition have been changed, for 
example : 

" Let the peoples spin forever down the ringing grooves of change" 

and 

" 'Tis the place, and round the gables, as of old, the curlews call." 

Among the new poems of this collection the Morte 
d' Arthur, the English idylls, Dora, and The Gardener s 
Daughter^' The Two Voices, Ulysses,] and St. Simeon 
Stylites, are the most remarkable, and call for special 
notice as marking an advance in the scope and ethical 

* A note to Dora in the 1842 edition stated " The idyll of 
Dora was partly suggested by one of Miss Mitford's pastorals ; 
and the ballad of Lady Clare by the novel of Inheritance. 
The reference here is to the story Dora Crcssxucll in Our Village.^' 
The Inheritance is by Susan Ferrier, of Edinburgh. 

f Founded on 26 canto of Dante's Inferno. 



56 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

significance of the poet's art. When these poems were 
published Tennyson had passed the first two stages 
of his poetical career — the derivative period, during 
which he was in turn influenced by preceding writers, 
and imitated their several manners, and the period 
of musical effects, in which the formal part of poetry, its 
sensuous beauty, had occupied his ear and mind. Ex- 
perience of real life — the death of his beloved friend, 
Arthur Hallam — awoke in him the fuller pulse of man- 
hood. The ebb and flow of human passion, the deeper 
currents in the lives of men, were now the springs of a 
less sensuous, more intellectual music. In )^outh, it was 
the loveliness and the charm of the world that took 
by storm his imagination ; in age, its majesty, its un- 
riddled mysteries, and far-reaching issues are the bur- 
den of his song. In Ulysses the many voices of the 
ocean summon the wanderer from inglorious rest, and 
once again he calls together his friends for a voyage 
of heroic enterprise ; in The Tivo Voices, the old yet 
ever new debate on the value and the issues of our 
mortal life is evolved with a wonderful skill and a 
critical exactness which brings to mind the art of 
Dryden, that master logician in verse ; in St. Simeon 
Stylites, the companion picture to Ulysses, the fruitless- 
ness of the creed that in its passion for another world 
neglects the present is vividly pictured, and we have 
in it the most dramatically conceived and executed 
poem he had yet written. Tennyson's mind, as I have 
elsewhere attempted to show, was in fuller sympa- 
thy with the ethics and ideals of Greek philosophy 
than with the self-effacing spirit of the Middle Ages. 
In this poem we have his criticism in dramatic form 
of the extreme asceticism, the " other-worldliness" of 
mediaeval Christianity, but it is a criticism full of 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 57 

sympathy. That he should have entered into its 
spirit, and exhibited the finer shades of feeling in a 
spiritual mood so foreign to his own gives to the 
poem an element of very special interest. It may be 
said that in The Idylls of the King — in some respects his 
most characteristic work — the mental attitude is dis- 
tinctly Christian. But I should prefer to describe the 
symbolism of the idylls as neo-Platonic. The allegory 
of " the soul at war with sense," though embodied in 
a chivalric romance, is pervaded by conceptions which 
have their root in the poetic mysticism of Plato's 
many-sided mind. The philosophic creed of Brown- 
ing and the devout faith of Mr. Aubrey de Vere, if 
their poetry be contrasted with Tennyson's, have their 
roots deep struck in the soil of pure Christianity,* and 
borrow from the philosophers subsidiary conceptions 
only ; with Tennyson, though his creed was indeed 
Christian, it was grafted on the tree of high pagan 
speculation. 

In these 1842 volumes Tennyson speaks out of his 
heart and mind. He remained till the last a delicate 
manipulator of musical phrases, but the substance, or 
what Aristotle would call " the soul of the poem," is 
no longer second to the diction, the body in which it 
resides. 

Dora and The Gardener s Daughter, like The Miller s 
Daughter of the previous volume, are vignettes of real 
country life, idyllic scenes, " tasting of Flora and the 
country green." It is the richness of colour, the lush 
luxuriance of beauty, not tropical, but through gen- 
erations ordered by skilful hands — such colour and 
luxuriance as English landscape alone can show — that 

* Note the spirit of sympathy with mediaeval Christianity present 
in their poetry. 



58 A TENXVSOX PRIMER. 

are lovingly dwelt upon in Tennyson's descriptive 
poetry. He was a patriot who loved his native coun- 
try best — her citizens, her government, her traditions, 
and not less the flowers in her fields, the skies above 
them, and the sea that keeps her inviolate. It is in- 
structive, however disillusionising, to note the extra- 
ordinary " inter\-al" in the fine judgment of such an 
artist, which permitted these lines (afterwards sup- 
pressed), entitled The Skipping- Rape, a place beside 
the truh- great poems of i S42 : 

" Sure never yet was antelope 

Could skip so lightly by. 
Stand off. or else ray skipping-rope 

Will hit you in the eye. 
How lightly whirls the skipping-rope ! 

How fairy -like you fly ! 
Go, get you gone, you muse and mope — 

I hate that silly sigh. 
Nay, dearest, teach me how to hope. 

Or tell me how to die. 
There, take it. take my skipping-rope, 

And hang yourself thereby."' 

The future may discover in this some oracmar mean- 
ing, but surely Fitzgerald was justified when he said : 
" Alfred, whatever he may think, cannot trifle. His 
smile is rather a grim one."* 

* Fitzgerald's Letitrs, p. 95. 



CHAPTER III. 

Since Shakespeare's day woman had not occupied 
in English poetry so large and gracious a space as in 
the character-studies of Tennyson's early volumes. 
The ideals of chivalry were come again, but enriched 
and refined. 

In The Princess, published in 1847, the now widely- 
known poet became the poetic interpreter and critic of 
that movement of thought and feeling which con- 
cerned itself with the position of woman in 
the social organisation. In a fantastic and The 
half serious, half sportive allegory, " moving Princess, 
as in a strange diagonal," he outlined and 1847. 
reduced to form the many elements in the 
problem, and by his statement, no less than by his solu- 
tion of the questions involved, gave definite and con- 
crete shape to the vague aspirations and somewhat 
nebulous ideas present in the intellectual atmos- 
phere. 

Criticise it as you will, and the early reviewers 
were not tardy in expressing disapproval. The Prin- 
cess is a poem full of Tennyson's own peculiar 
charm. " A medley," as it was called, incongru- 
ous and unreal, if it betrays the poet's faults and 
weaknesses, it cannot be denied to possess many of 
his most winning and most characteristic excellences. 
Like most of his longer poems, it was built up to its 
present shape through successive editions. The sec- 
ond edition, published after a year's interval, contained 



6o A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

few changes, and was dedicated to Henry Lushington,* 
an ardent admirer, with whom the author was on a 
visit in September, 1847, ^"d whose friendship was 
one of the most prized in his life. With the third 
edition (1850) began the series of extensive emenda- 
tions, omissions, and additions, which were continued 
in the fourth and fifth editions of 185 1 and 1853. 
The hint for the story is by some believed to have 
been given in Johnson's Rasselas. " The princess 
thought, that of all sublunary things, knowledge was 
the best ; she desired, first, to learn all sciences, 
and then proposed to found a college of learned 
women, in which she would preside, that, by convers- 
ing with the old and educating the young, she might 
divide her time between the acquisition and commu- 
nication of wisdom, and raise up for the next age 
models of prudence and patterns of piety." It has 
been suggested by others that the inspiration came 
from Defoe or Margaret Cavendish's Female Academy. 
By others, again, the clue to the genesis of The Prin- 
cess is found in the lines : 

" This were a medley ! we should have him back 
Who told the ' Winter's Tale' to do it for us," 

and the central idea in the plot of Love' s Labour s Lost, 
which turns upon a three years' enforced seclusion in 
study and apart from women: 

" Our court shall be a little Academe, 
Still and contemplative in living art." 

The question is not a grave one and need not be 

* " If all Mr. Tennyson's writings had by some strange accident 
been destroyed, Henry Lushington's wonderful memory could, I 
believe, have reproduced the whole." — Memoir of Henry Lushing- 
ton, by G. S. Venables. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 6l 

definitely answered. The scene of the Prologue is 
laid in the south of England, and the surroundings 
are those of Sir John Simeon's garden at Swainston. 
The host, in whose grounds the opening festival is 
held, is probably the poet's friend under the disguise 
of Sir Walter Vivian. Some lines (afterwards omit- 
ted) in the Epilogue, which was almost entirely re- 
written for the third edition, give an account of the 
original design, and its subsequent development: 

" Here closed our compound story, which at first 
Had only meant to banter little maids 
With mock heroics and with parody ; 
But slipt in some strange way, crost with burlesque, 
From mock to earnest, even into tones 
Of tragic, and with less and less of jest 
To such a serious end." 

Besides remodelling the Prologue and Epilogue, and 
in many respects shaping the poem to a later design, 
Tennyson added to the third edition the exquisite 
songs, which alone secure for the work in which they 
are set an immortality of remembrance. It already 
contained that wonderful isometric lyric, Tears, Idle 
Tears, which I am inclined to regard as the most 
characteristic of his genius of any poem ever writ- 
ten by the author, and that for two reasons. It is 
his most successful expression of the emotion of 
vague regret, of dumb inarticulate pain of heart, a 
province of universal human feeling, which Tenny- 
son alone among poets* has found a voice to render, 
and thus made peculiarly his own. 
Here, as in the lines : 

* If he have a rival in this province it is Goethe. 



62 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

" Break, break, break 

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea !"* 

he has sounded the hidden and mysterious places of 
the soul, whence at times wells up a nameless and a 
causeless sorrow, and to its incommunicable speech the 
chords of his music vibrate. And of the music the 
form, too, is all his own. That the measure is the 
measure of Hamlet and the. Paradise Lost is difficult to 
realise. The subtle sweetness of the modulation is 
typical of Tennyson's handling of our great national 
metre, and is displayed here in its fullest perfection. 
He discovered in it a lyric quality hitherto unsus- 
pected, and if it be objected that the division into 
stanzas and the recurrence of the phrase " days that 
are no more'' serves to compensate for the absence of 
rhyme, it is only necessary to turn to the '' small 
sweet idyll," "Come down, O maid, from yonder 
mountain height," where without stanza or definite 
rhyme the effect of lyric movement is perfectly at- 
tained. In the concluding lines of the last-named 
poem there is much onomatopoeic beauty : f 

" Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, 
The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 
And murmuring of innumerable bees." 

* " Written," said Tennyson, " in a Lincolnshire lane at five 
o'clock in the morning." 

f "Onomatopoeic effects are common in Tennyson, as in such 
a passage as this : 

"Plunged : and the Jlood drew j yet I caught her ; Ihen 
Oaring one arm, and bearing in my left 
The weight of all the hopes of half the world, 
Strove to buffet to land in z'ain," 

■ — The Princess. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 63 

" Who after three such lines," wrote Charles Kings- 
ley, " will talk of English as a harsh and clumsy 
language, and seek in the effeminate and monotonous 
Italian for expressive melody of sound ? Who cannot 
hear in them the rapid rippling of the water, the 
stately calmness of the wood dove's note, and in the 
repetition of short syllables and soft liquids in the 
last line : * 

" The murmuring of innumerable bees" ? 

I may here note, in passing, possible suggestions for 
one or two of the songs. For the third Moore's lyric, 
How Sweet the Ansiver Echo Makes, and for the fifth 
the tenth section of Canto I. of Scott's Lay\ and the 
Anglo-Saxon fragment, Gudrun. 

To the fourth edition of The Princess were added 
the passages relating to the " weird seizures" of the 
Prince, and a few minor alterations were introduced 
into the text ; the fifth contained for the first time the 

Or here, where the sound of the violin is imitated in the " n"s 
and " u"s. 

" All night have the roses heard 
The Jlute, violin, bassoon : 
All night has the casement jessamine stirred 
To the dancers dancing in tune," 

— Maud. 

* Of this idyll Symonds writes in his Studies of the Greek 
Poets : "It transfers with perfect taste the Greek idyllic feeling 
to Swiss scenery ; it is a fine instance of new wine being success- 
fully poured into old bottles, for nothing could be fresher, and not 
even the Thalysia is sweeter." But Mr. Symonds is wrong when 
he speaks of it (Appendix) as containing "no reiterated sounds." 
Let any one read the first half-dozen lines and judge for himself. 
The place of rhymed endings is taken by interlaced repetitions of the 
same words and phrases. The rhyming may not be regular, but the 
poem is full of rhymes. 



64 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

fifteen lines in the Prologue, beginning " O miracle 
of women." Among the many omissions which were 
made between the successive issues one possesses an 
interest which make it perhaps worthy of record. It 
occurs in the speech of the Princess in answer to 
Lady Blanche. 

" But Ida with a voice, that like a bell 

ToU'd by an earthquake in a trembling tower, 
Rang ruin, answered full of grief and scorn 

What ! ill our time of glory when the cause 
Noiv stands tip, first, a trophied pillar — now 
So dipt, so stinted in onr triumph — bai-rcd 
Evn front our free heart-thanks, and every way 

Thwarted and vext, and lastly catechised 

By our own creature ! one that made our la7i>s ! 

Our great she- Solon ! her that built the nest 

To hatch the cuckoo ! whom we called our friend ! 
But we will crush the lie that glances at ns 
As cloaking in the larger charities 
Some baby predilection : all amazed ! 

We must amaze this legislator more." 

[Here follow eight retained lines.] 

" Go help the half -brained dwarf Society, 
To find loio motives unto noble deeds. 
To fix all doubt ttpon the darker side y 
Go, fitter there for narrowest neighbourhoods. 
Old talker, haunt where gossip breeds and seethes. 
And festers in provincial sloth ! and you. 
That think we sought to practise on a life 
Risk'd for our own and trusted to our hands. 
What say you, sir? you hear us ; deem ye not 
' Tis all too like that even now we scheme. 
In one broad death confounding friend and foe. 
To drug them all? revolve it ; yozi are man. 
And therefore no doubt wise." 

Both the poem and the character of the Princess 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 65 

have gained much by the rejection of these weak and 
tasteless lines. 

The pause that occurs at the close of the fourth 
canto when Lilia sings : 

" Thy voice is heard thro' rolling drums," 

marks the " change in the music," the transition from 
gay to grave, the point at which the " enchanted rev- 
erie" passes into the serious allegory. It will be 
noticed that the songs at once reflect and focus the 
significant or uppermost sentiment of the cantos they 
separate and unite, and may be read as a clue to the 
poet's philosophy of the relations between the sexes. 
Around the child gather all the elements in the social 
problem, and in so far as Tennyson offers any solu- 
tion of that problem it is by emphasising the laws of 
nature which determine in their inexorable fashion the 
place of the man and the place of the woman in any 
social system that is to endure. To say that 

" Woman is not undevelopt man 

But diverse ; could we make her as the man, 
Sweet Love were slain ;" 

to say that they must 

" Sit side by side, fuU-summ'd in all their powers, 
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be" — 

this is but to give poetic expression to very evident 
things, but it is also to give expression to the only 
"thinkable" philosophy of the matter. Tennyson 
has added nothing to our knowledge, but he has 
beautifully summed for us, as an artist should, the 
teaching of nature, our mother. 

In many respects the distinctive elements in Ten- 
nyson's poetic genius — certainly those of his youthful 



66 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

genius — the branches of his art in which he excelled 
are most prominently exhibited and may be most 
advantageously studied in this poem. The idyll was 
a form borrowed indeed from the Greek, but, suited 
as it was to his powers, the form which he made espe- 
cially his own. And T/ic Princess is an idyll or series 
of idyllic pictures where the sweetness of his versifi- 
cation, his subtle skill in word-painting, and his keen 
and yet gracious vein of pleasantry meet under the 
felicitous auspices of a subject eminently iippropriate 
to their display. 

The Laureate's model in blank verse was Milton, 
and his verse displays the artist's reverence for a 
greater artist. Compared with Milton's, his blank 
verse is distinguished by the much larger proportion 
it contains of words of pure English stock, by the 
comparative frequency with which the pause comes 
at the end of the line and by his preference for the 
internal pause after the fourth syllable to that after 
the sixth, which was Milton's favourite. The splen- 
dour of the great wheeling circles of Milton's verse, its 
organ-like harmony, the billowy mounting volume of 
its music, is in large measure due to its periodic struc- 
ture. Milton constructed his verse in paragraphs, car- 
ing more for the effect of the whole than of its consti- 
tuent parts, and so arranging the pause and cadence of 
his single lines that the ear remains attent until the 
final strain is reached, in which the suggested harmo- 
nies are all resolved, each paragraph 

" swelling loudly 
Up to its climax, ami then dying proudly." 

With Tennyson the single line is more frequently 
sufficient for itself, the periodic system less conspicu- 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 6/ 

ous. The traditional licences, elision such as is exhib- 
ited here : 

" O swallozu, stuallo'cu, if / could follow and light 
Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill" — 

an occasional initial trochee, or in the second or fourth 
foot, in room of the iambus, and feminine endings, are 
to be found in Tennyson, as in most other writers, but 
he is more uniformly careful to avoid abruptness or 
harshness ; so much so, that his verse exhibits a more 
evenly polished surface than that of any other English 
poet. Among musical devices, alliteration ranks as 
his first favourite, and is used throughout his poetry 
with unusually fine effect and with less insistence than 
by Mr. Swinburne, whose monotony in this respect is 
not infrequently exasperating, Tennyson's allitera- 
tion, skilfully introduced in its unapparent form 
when the similarity of sound occurs in the body rather 
than in the initial letters of words, as, for example : 

" A /ife that lea.ds melod'ioxxs days," 

accounts for much of his melodic beauty. His pov- 
erty in rhymes, a point in which he offers a striking 
contrast to Browning, who is royal in affluence, is 
particularly noticeable in his longest rhymed poem, 
In Me/iioriam J* a poverty compensated by studied 
and ingenious arrangement of alliterative phrases, as 
once more, for example : 

" Wild Inrd whose wdixble /iqui(/ Jte'eet. " 

Instances may be found, I believe, in every section of 
this poem. A critical and scientific workman in his 

* See Tennyson and " Jn A/finoriain," by J. Jacobs (Uavid 
Nutt, London.) 



68 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

measures, Tennyson might have been trusted to write 
upon any subject at any length without fear of descent 
into the slipshod or turgid movement of Wordsworth's 
lengthy disquisitions. 

The word-painting of TJic Pri/icess, no less than its 
versification, will reward a careful stud}'. It seems 
that the author was in the habit of noting a scene or 
aspect of nature in a few brief phrases, as a painter 
might with a dash or two of colour suggest a scheme 
for future elaboration. Here is the result where the 
memory of an approaching storm, seen from the brow 
of Snowdon, supplied the original suggestion : 

" As one that climbs a peak to gaze 
O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud 
Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night, 
Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore, 
And suck the blinding splendour from the sand, 
And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn 
Expunge the world." 

I am unacquainted with any poem exhibiting a more 
luxuriant richness of colour or more vivid and delicate 
picturesqueness of imagery. Illustration is needless, 
but take this : 

" Many a little hand 
Glanced like a touch of sunshine on the rocks. 
Many a light foot shone like a jewel set 
In the dark crag." 

In its entirety, T/ie Pn'rui'ss, though not his most 
ambitious work, displays, as I have already indicated, 
the qualities of Tennyson's genius which the future 
will speak of as '* Tennysonian," as exclusively his 
own, the qualities which of all English poets he pos- 
sessed and cultivated in the fullest measure. It is the 
highest conceivable reach in decorative art, nor can 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 69 

lyrical sweetness be further sweetened. Half classic, 
half mediaeval in feeling, wholly modern in subject 
and treatment, it represents the character of the 
author's mind. His culture enabled him to embellish 
and enrich with a wealth of suggestion and illustration 
so fresh a theme as the emancipation of woman, in a 
style of captivating, dream-like phantasy, and, as in 
The Idylls of the King, the strongest elements in his 
nature, mysticism and romance, are subtly woven 
through the whole. 

The following letter, the most important and inter- 
esting ever written by Tennyson in connexion with 
his poetry, was addressed to Mr. S. E. Dawson, author 
of A Study of " The Princess." It naturally claims a 
place here : 

"Aldworth, Haslemere, Surrey, 

November 21, 1882. 

" Dear Sir : I thank you for your able and thought- 
ful essay on The Princess. You have seen, among 
other things, that if women ever were to play such 
freaks, the tragic and the burlesque might go hand in 
hand. I may tell you that the songs were not an 
afterthought. Before the first edition came out I 
deliberated with myself whether I should put songs 
in between the separate divisions of the poem ; again, 
I thought, the poem will explain itself ; but the public 
did not see that the child, as you say, was the heroine 
of the piece, and at last I conquered my laziness and 
inserted them. You would be still more certain that 
the child was the true heroine, if instead of the first 
song as it now stands, 

" ' As thro' the land at eve we went,' 

I had printed the first song which I wrote, The Losing 



yo A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

of the Child. The child is sitting on the bank of the 
river, and playing with flowers ; a flood comes down ; 
a dam has been broken through ; the child is borne 
down by the flood ; the whole village distracted ; after 
a time the flood has subsided ; the child is thrown 
safe and sound again upon the bank, and all the women 
are in raptures. I quite forget the words of the bal- 
lad, but I think I may have it somewhere. 

"Your explanatory notes are very much to the pur- 
pose, and I do not object to your finding parallelisms. 
They must always recur. A man (a Chinese scholar) 
some time ago wrote to me, saying that in an unknown, 
untranslated Chinese poem there were two whole lines 
of mine almost word for word. Why not ? Are not 
human eyes all over the world looking at the same 
objects, and must there not consequently be coinci- 
dences of thought and impressions and expressions ? 
It is scarcely possible for any one to say or write any- 
thing in this late time of the world to which in the 
rest of the literature of the world a parallel could not 
somewhere be found. But when you say that this 
passage or that was suggested by Wordsworth or 
Shelley or another, I demur, and, more, I wholly dis- 
agree. There was a period in my life when, as an 
artist — Turner, for instance — takes rough sketches of 
language, etc., in order to work them eventually into 
some great picture ; so I was in the habit of chroni- 
cling, in four or five words or more, whatever might 
strike me as picturesque in nature. I never put these 
down, and many and many a line has gone away on 
the north wind, but some remain — e.g. : 

" ' A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight.* 
" Suggestion : The sea one night at Torquay, when 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 'J\ 

Torquay was the most lovely sea village in England, 
though now a smoky town ; the sky was covered with 
thin vapour, and the moon was behind it. 

" ' A great black cloud 

Drags inward from the deep.' 

" Suggestion : A coming storm seen from the top of 
Snowdon. In the Idylls of the King : 

" ' With all 
Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies.' 

" Suggestion : A storm that came iijion us in the mid- 
dle of the North Sea. 

" ' As the water-lily starts and slides.' 

" Suggeetion : Water-lilies in my own pond, seen in 
a gusty day with my own eyes. They did start and 
slide in the sudden puffs of wind till caught and stayed 
by the tether of their own stalks — quite as true as 
Wordsworth's simile, and more in detail. 

" ' A wild wind shook — 

Follow, follow, thou shalt win.' 

"Suggestion : I was walking in the New Forest. A 
wind did arise, and : 

" ' Shake the songs, the whispers and the shrieks 
Of the wild wood together.' 

" The wind, I believe, was a west wind, but because 
I wished the Prince to go south, I turned the wind to 
the south, and naturally the wind said, ' Follow.' 

" I believe the resemblance which you note is just a 
chance one. Shelley's lines are not familiar to me, 
though, of course, if they occur in T/ie Prometheus I 
must have read them. 

" I could multiply instances, but I will not bore 
you ; and far indeed am I from asserting that books. 



72 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

as well as nature, are not and ought not to be sug- 
gestive to the poet. I am sure that I myself and many 
others find a peculiar charm in those passages of such 
great masters as Virgil or Milton where they adopt 
the creation of a bygone poet, and reclothe it, more or 
less, according to their own fancy. 

" But there is, I fear, a prosaic set growing up 
among us, editors of booklets, bookworms, index- 
hunters, or men of great memories and no imagination, 
who impute themselves to the poet, and so believe 
that he, too, has no imagination, but is forever poking 
his nose between the pages of some old volume in or- 
der to see what he can appropriate. The)' will not allow 
one to say, ' Ring the bells ' without finding that we 
have taken it from Sir P. Sydne}', or even to use such 
a simple expression as the ocean * roars ' without find- 
ing out the precise verse in Homer or Horace from 
which we have plagiarised it. (Fact !) 

" I have known an old fishwife who had lost two 
sons at sea clench her fist at the advancing tide on a 
stormy day and cry out : ' Ay, roar ; do ! How I hates 
to see thee show thy white teeth ! ' Now, if I had 
adopted her exclamation, and put it into the mouth of 
some old woman in one of m}' poems, I dare say the 
critic would have thought it original enough, but 
would most likely have advised me to go to nature for 
my old woman, and not to my imagination ; and, 
indeed, it is a strong figure. Here is another little 
anecdote about suggestion. When I was about twenty 
or twenty-one I went on a tour to the Pyrenees. 
Ljnng among these mountains before a waterfall that 
comes down one thousand or twelve hundred feet, 
I sketched it (according to my custom then) in these 
words : 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 73 

" ' Slow-drnpping veils of thinnest lawn.' 

When I printed this a critic informed me that ' lawn' 
was the material used in theatres to imitate a water- 
fall, and graciously added : ' Mr. T. should not go to 
the boards of a theatre, but to nature herself, for his 
suggestions.' And I had gone to nature herself. I 
think it is a moot point whether, if I had known how 
that effect was produced on the stage, I should have 
ventured to publish the line. I beg you to believe 
me, etc., A. Tennyson." 

" P. S. — By the by, you are wrong about ' the trem- 
ulous isles of light ;' they are isles of light, spots of 
sunshine coming through the eaves, and seeming to 
slide from one to the other, as the procession of girls 
* move under the shade.' And surely the ' beard-blown 
goat ' involves a sense of the wind blowing the beard 
on the height of the ruined pillar." 



CHAPTER IV. 

Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson's college friend 
and constant companion, died in September, 1833. 
From their first meeting until the companionship was 
broken by death not quite five years elapsed,* and al- 
most seventeen years passed away before 
InMemoriam. the elegy which has become the imperish- 
1850. able monument of their friendship was 
given to the world. f The poems composing 
it were written at intervals during Tennyson's life in 
London, and the whole was complete or almost com- 
plete long prior to its publication. '"A. T. has near a 
volume of poems — elegiac — in memory of Arthur 
Hallam," wrote Fitzgerald in January, 1845 ; " don't 
you think the world wants other notes than elegiac 
now ? Lycidas is the utmost length an elegiac should 
reach. But Spedding praises ; and I suppose the ele- 
giacs will see daylight, public daylight, one day." 
When the elegiacs did see daylight, five years later, 
they were published anonymously, but Tennyson's 
name upon the title-page was not necessary to pro- 
claim him the author. 

* /;/ AI cm or tarn, xxii. 

\ An interesting circumstance connects Hallam with another 
great English elegy, Adoiiais. It was first printed in Pisa, under 
the direction of Byron, and a copy of the pamphlet was brought by 
Hallam from Italy. The poem appeared for the first time in an 
English edition, accessible to English readers, in The Transactions 
of the Caml)ridge Union, 1834. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 75 

The attention of a reader of In Memoriavi is 
at the outset naturally directed to the form of the 
stanza, which is unvaried throughout. The arrange- 
ment of the transposed quatrain has much to do 
with the effect produced by the poem as a whole 
and in its several parts ; it strikes the key-note of the 
elegiac mood, and thus preserves throughout sections 
that deal with very varying subject-matter the unity 
of sentiment which binds them together ; and when the 
poet is dealing with the philosophical problems that 
naturally suggest themselves in such a poem, the 
thought flows with less interruption into the mould of 
this than it could conceivably have done into any other 
rhymed form among English measures. I have no 
doubt that the possibilities in the stanza for refiective 
elegiac poetry were suggested to Tennyson by the 
short elegy composed in the same metre by Ben Jon- 
son.* Might one not accept this, for example, as part 
of the later poem ? 

" Who, as an offering at your shrine, 

Have sung this hymn, and here entreat 
One spark of your diviner heat 
To light upon a love of mine." 

The same measure was employed by Lord Herbert, of 
Cherbury,f in a short love poem of small merit but 
more interest, as containing verses such as these, 
which so nearly recall the later music : 

" O no, belov'd ! I am most sure 
Those virtuous habits we acquire, 
As being with the soul entire, 
Must with it evermore endure. 

* Ben Jonson's Underwoods. f Born 1581. Died 1648. 



76 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

•' Else should our souls in vain elect ; 
And vainer yet were heaven's laws, 
When to an everlasting cause 
They gave a perishing effect. 

" These eyes again thine eyes shall see, 
And hands again these hands infold ; 
And all chaste pleasures can be told, 
Shall with us everlasting be."* 

I do not know that Tennyson has anywhere invented 
anew poetic form ; but here, as throughout his poetry, 
he proves his possession of that singular penetration 
of judgment which made choice with perfect instinct 
of the formal mould best suited to his theme. As will 
be seen, I incline to regard the pre-eminent quality in 
his genius as keen-sighted judgment rather than power 
of initiative or originating way of thovight. The orig- 
inal thinker is original in the disengagement of his men- 
tal processes from the grooves in which the thoughts 
of ordinary men run, and in his presentation of the 
facts with which all are familiar in new and unex- 
pected relationships. Tennyson — and no better ex- 
ample of my meaning need be adduced than this poem 
— is a great and deservedly popular poet because his 
way of thought is that of the cultivated minds of his 
time ; and his large and indisputable influence in the 
shaping of the ideas of that time is in great degree 
due to the ripeness of the popular mind to receive 
those ideas, and to the fact that his precision and 
beauty of expression made clear to his readers what 
they had already themselves obscurely felt and 
thought. Does any one ask : " Is this not to be a great 
poet, a poet of the first order ?" I would answer, " It 

* From An Ode upon the Question moved. Whether Love should 
continue forever? 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. TJ 

is to be a great poet, but not a poet of the first order, 
for it recalls the greatness of Pope and of Gray, it sug- 
gestsno companionship with Dante, with Milton, or with 
Wordsworth." It may, perhaps, again be asked : "Is 
not Virgil a poet of the first order, and is not Tennyson 
comparable to Virgil ?" To me it seems that fortu- 
nate as Tennyson was in the hour of his birth, he 
lacked a supreme poetic lot such as fell to Virgil — 
still, in Bacon's words, " The chastest poet and the 
royalest that to the memory of man is known" — to be 
the acknowledged poetic representative of Rome's 
imperial race, to have for theme, majestic and incom- 
parable, the foundation and the glories of Rome itself. 
Published when the century had reached its middle 
year. In Mcmoriam best reflects of any poem written 
during the century the current moods of its thought 
and feeling. Here are put into verse the problems of 
the head and heart that were uppermost in men's minds 
in the days in which he wrote, so that the poet, while 
he speaks of his personal sorrow, is really a man of 
his time, speaking for his contemporaries. For this 
reason /;/ Memoriam is an elegy in a class by itself, 
nor can it, to any purpose, be compared with poems 
like Lycidas or Adonais. Each of these is a dirge, 
in which the person of the lost friend is never lost 
sight of, whereas the later elegy is a series of lyrics, 
many of which are general reflections in the presence 
of death the thought-compeller, rather than songs of 
mourning for a definite grief.* And, moreover, be- 

* " It is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine. In 
the poem altogether private grief swells out into thought of and 
hope for the whole world. It begins with a funeral and ends with 
a marriage, begins with death and ends in promise of a new life — 
a sort of Divine Comedy, cheerful at the close. It is a very im- 



78 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

cause it mirrors the life of the mind and heart in the 
valley of the shadow, its appeal is to emotions that are 
universal and thoughts that visit the homes of all the 
world. While, then, an expression of personal loss, and 
modern in its theological and philosophical features, 
In Memoriam is most purely human in its interest of 
all elegiac poems that ever were written. Like Gray's 
elegy, in this predominance of the human element 
over the personal it takes a place in the hearts of its 
readers that the marvellous art and witchery of colour 
in Lycidas and Adonais can never give them. 

In the history of theology In Memoriam marks the 
beginnings of that school of thought represented 
within the Church by Frederick Denison Maurice — the 
Broad Church movement, as it is called, which was 
itself the outcome of the more liberal and deeper 
view of life, its meaning and its issues, presented in 
the Transcendental philosophy. But while the in- 
fluences of Kant and the later German thinkers, radi- 
ated in England by Coleridge and Carlyle, are abun- 
dantly apparent in Tennyson's philosophy, fairly sum- 
med in this poem, we must be careful to abstain from 
any effort to find in the poetic statement of his 
thought any definite scheme or system. If I were 
asked to give some succinct statement of Tennyson's 
philosophy, I should say that he emphasises in every 
line of his reflective poetry the creed of the higher 
emotions. Born as he was into a critical epoch, he 

personal poem, as well as personal. There is more about myself 
in Ulysses, which was written under the sense of loss and all that 
had gone by, but that still life must be fought out to the end. It 
was more written with the feeling of his loss upon mo than many 
poems in /// Menioiiaiit." — " K tin arks of Tfiuiysoii," quoted b_v 
the editor in the Nineteenth Century, January, 1893. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 79 

could not but feel the uncertainties that mar, the 
doubt that threatens the most firmly built and most 
zealously guarded dogmas. Yet Tennyson's strength 
as a thinker seems to me to have lain in the sceptical 
attitude of his mind, not indeed towards the older 
forms of faith, but towards the newer creeds of science, 
which in the first flush of their youth claimed an easy 
victory, ere the ground upon which the battle was to be 
fought lay clearly mapped or determined before men's 
eyes. In his refusal to accept the negatives of science 
— a refusal more than justified even before his own 
death — in his conviction that the uncertainties of the 
new teaching were more uncertain, the doubts as to 
the reality of its solutions of the old problems to be 
doubted more gravely than those attaching to revela- 
tion, in this the penetration of his judgment was 
eminently proved. It is this grasp of real amid in- 
numerable false issues, this intellectual sanity, which 
dignifies Tennyson as a thinker no less than a poet. 
If he lacked the power of imaginative synthesis, which 
in a brain like Plato's marshals the facts of the world 
under the unity of a self-consistent system, his an- 
alytic faculty probed deep and far. 

I have said that briefly summed Tennyson's creed 
maybe described as the creed of the higher emotions. 
The powerlessness of the human mind face to face 
with the tremendous problems of " why ? whence ? 
whither?" its inherent incapacity to solve these ques- 
tions, was forced upon him, as it was forced upon his 
contemporaries, Clough and Arnold. But while with 
them in this, he did not share their spiritual dejection 
or sad stoic acquiescence in an unavoidable lot. Fall- 
ing back upon a testimony higher than any that could 
be submitted to a critical scientific examination, he 



8o A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

took up his position in the ancient and impregnable 
fortress of the soul that refuses to doubt its Divine 
origin, its home in God. 

" If e'er, when faith had fallen asleep, 
I heard a voice, ' Believe no more,' 
And heard an ever-breaking shore 
That tumbled in the Godless deep; 

" A warmth within the breast would melt 
The freezing reason's colder part. 
And like a man in wrath the heart 
Stood up and answer'd, ' I have felt.'"* 

This creed, based upon the higher emotions, or, as 
we may perhaps call it, the evidence of the best and 
noblest moments of the spirit's inner life, is the spirit- 
ual message borne to his youthful friend by the An- 
cient Sage: 

" For nothing worthy proving can be proven, 
Nor yet disproven ; wherefore thou be wise, 
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, 
And cling to faith beyond the forms of faith." 

The history of the soul in grief, such a grief, with 
its accompanying cloud of torturing doubts, as Death, 
the parter of friends, alone can bring, is in this poem 
delineated with a fidelity we dare not challenge. Its 
passage from affection for an earthly to devotion to- 
wards a heavenly friend, from vague doubt to hope- 
ful trust, from " wild unrest " to peace, is strikingly 
matched in the history of the soul in Carlyle's Sartor 
Jiesartus. From "the everlasting no" until the 
" centre of indifference" is passed the shadow lies 
deep upon the path, and then slowly "a full new life" 

* /;/ Menioriain, cxxiv. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 8 1 

is breathed, drawn in part from the subtle helpful- 
ness of Nature in her time of spring,* until " the ever- 
lasting yea" is realised. In Mcmoriam has been com- 
pared with the sonnet-sequence of Shakespeare, and 
the comparison is not without interest. Many of 
Tennyson's phrases were borrowed from these son- 
nets; in both series of poems the deepest feelings and 
convictions of the heart and mind are reflected, and 
in both the labour of the artist strangely mingles a 
pleasure with its pain. 

While it outlines no system of thought, no philos- 
ophy of consolation, Iti Memoriam is pre-eminently a 
poem strong in soothing influences, in assuaging 
remedies for the pain of loss. It can hardly be said 
that Tennyson fortifies the mind and heart as Brown- 
ing or as Wordsworth fortifies them. He supports and 
consoles, indeed, in that the reader is taken into his 
confidence, and learns what were the supports and 
consolations of the poet in his dark hour. Thus by 
sympathy with the sorrow he is drawn insensibly to 
sympathy with hope renewed and faith regained. In 
the presentment of his own experience, in that series 
of delicate sketches of the healing influences of time 
and nature allied against victorious despair Tennyson 
speaks to every mourner an unforgettable word. 

Here, perhaps, may be fitly noticed the art displayed 
by Tennyson in making Nature sympathise with his va- 
rying moods. He finds in her an echo of his own secret 
feeling, and her sights and sounds minister to his heart. 

" Calm is the morn without a sound, 
Calm as to suit a calmer grief, 
And only thro' the faded leaf 
The chestnut pattering to the ground." 

* In Memoriam^ Ixxxvi. 



82 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

The lucid beauty and completeness of the scenes 
depicted in his earlier poems, in themselves delight- 
ful, prepare in each case the mind for the mood or 
sentiment that prevails throughout the story. In The 
Lotos-Eaters, for example, or in such idyllic scenes as 
are drawn in poems like The Miller s Daughter, Nature 
is in perfect harmony with the prevailing emotion, at 
once intensifying and interpreting it. Much of the 
charm resident in Tennyson's setting of tales, them- 
selves destitute of any special interest, may be directly 
traced to the exquisite appropriateness of the back- 
ground chosen and the no less exquisite skill in its 
pourtrayal. 

A careful study of In Memoriain reveals more of 
design than is at first apparent in the arrangement of 
the lyrics.* Probably because it was long mature, 
before it was given to the world, the changes in later 
editions, if we except verbal alterations, are fewer than 
is the case with most of Tennyson's longer poems. f 
Two sections only were added : xxxix. (" Old warder 
of these buried bones") in the pocket volume edition, 
and lix. (" O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me ?") in the 
fourth edition of 185 1. The design, therefore, was 
complete from the first, and the sequence of sections 
has not been interfered with. It seems clear that 
Nos. i.-lvi. (now Ivii. by reason of the interpolated 
"yew tree" section) were complete in themselves and 
were written, most of them, in the first year. No. 

* Tennyson is quoted by Mr. Knowles {^Nineteenth Century, Jan- 
uary, 1S93) as saying that there are "nine natural groups" of 
stanzas in the poem. These are : 1-8 ; g-20 ; 20-27 ; 28-49 ; 
50-58 ; 59-72 ; 72-98 ; 99-103 ; 104-131. 

\ Few for Tennyson ; about fifty verbal and other changes were 
made since its publication. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 83 

Ivi. (Ivii.) has a marked conclusion, and Ivii. (Iviii.) is 
introductory to a supplement. That supplement be- 
gan with " He past, a soul of nobler tone," to which 
he afterwards prefixed lix. It is to be observed that 
he himself makes lix. begin the sixth of his nine 
groups. These five groups might be called Death, 
Burial, the Past, Christmas Hopes, the Future. The 
lapse of time is clearly marked ; the three Christmas 
seasons following the death of Hallam, in September, 
1833, are each the subject of a section or sections,* 
and the whole is therefore a mental history of the 
years of the poet's life immediately following 1833. 
The Epilogue is a marriage greeting to Cecilia Ten- 
nyson, who, in October, 1842, was married to Edward 
Law Lushington. 

One more word may be added. I note in this poem 
a purity of colour in its pictorial passages, a quieter 
music than is elsewhere to be found in Tennyson's 
poetry. To one who takes up a volume of his verse 
after a volume by, let us say, a contemporary — Mat- 
thew Arnold — the colour seems glaring, and at times 
the music loud and even noisy. Arnold's ideal in the 
poetic art was a chastened simplicity, a reliance for 
effect in a poem, to use his own phrase concerning 
Wordsworth, solely on the weight and force of that 
which with entire fidelity it utters. Tennyson's deco- 
rative art, his love of colour for its own sake, of music 
for its own sake, lead him at times into what must 
always seem to the highly cultivated sense extrava- 
gances of colour, an over-profusion, a lush luxuriance, 
and into similar extravagances of sound. To put it 
briefly, he rarely trusts his thought, as Wordsworth 

*xxviii.-xx.x. ; Ixviii. ; civ.-cv. 



84 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

trusted it, to build for itself a natural home of expres- 
sion. So much an artist was he that Nature could 
not speak his language, and hence the inevitable word 
is rarely heard in his poetry. Compare a poem like 
that entitled Palladium, or a poem like that To 
Marguerite, beginning : 

" Yes, in the sea of life enisled" — 

compare these with almost any poems by Tennyson, 
and it will be seen that in the one case the power and 
charm of the verse belong in the main to the idea, in 
the other case frequently to the language in which it 
is clothed. 

Save in In Mcmoriam and in some of the finer pas- 
sages of the Idylls, I do not know that elsewhere in 
Tennyson's more ambitious poetry is the decorative 
instinct, the laying of colour for the sake of colour, so 
restrained, the reliance upon the emotion or the idea 
so complete, the expression so simply and directly nat- 
ural, as in the above and in a hundred other poems by 
Wordsworth or Arnold. If I am right, therefore, a 
purer ideal of art, a more fastidious taste guides the 
artist's hand in this than in any other part of his work : 

" Till now the doubtful dusk reveal'd 

The knoll once more where, couch'd at ease, 
The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees 
Laid their dark arms about the field ; 

" And, suck'd from out the distant gloom, 
A breeze began to tremble o'er 
The large leaves of the sycamore, 
And fluctuate all the still perfume, 

" And gathering freshlier overhead, 

Rock'd the fuU-foliaged elms, and swung 
The heavy-folded rose, and flung 
The lilies to and fro, and said, 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 85 

" ' The dawn, the dawn,' and died away ; 
And East and West, without a breath, 
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, 
To broaden into boundless day." 

Had he been content at all times to trust his subject 
as he has trusted it here, Tennyson would not only 
have been a greater poet, he would have been even a 
greater artist than he was, for the greatest artists are 
those who allow Nature to write in their names, and 
are themselves too wise to interfere with or add a 
word to the language she speaks. 

It seems a far journey from the philosophy of In 
Memoriatn to the philosophy of Maud, from the 
poetry of a sad resignment to that of revolt ; yet 
there is little difficulty in recognizing the same hand 
in both, the same worker in different moods. As 
has been already observed, the germ from 
which Maud was developed is the lyric, (^3,^4 and 
" Oh, that 'twere possible," contributed in other Poems. 
1837 to The Tribute, a collection of miscel- 1855. 
laneous unpublished poems by various 
authors, published by John Murray, and edited by 
Lord Northampton. Among the other contributors 
were Wordsworth, Landor, Aubrey de Vere, Henry 
Taylor, Southey, Monckton Milnes, and Charles Ten- 
nyson. The proceeds from the sale of this publica- 
tion were intended to relieve the necessities of the 
Rev. Edward Smedley, a clergyman in ill health and 
threatened with loss of eyesight. Smedley died be- 
fore the book appeared, and the proceeds were given 
to his family. In reply to Milnes' application to him 
for a contribution, Tennyson wrote : " Three summers 
back, provoked by the incivility of editors, I swore an 
oath that I would never again have to do with their 



86 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

vapid books, and I broke it in the sweet face of 
Heaven when I wrote for Lady What's-her-name 
Wortley. But then her sister wrote to Brookfield, and 
said she (Lady W.) was beautiful ; so I could not help 
it. But whether the Marquis be beautiful or not, I 
don't much mind ; if he be, let him give God thanks, 
and make no boast. To write for people with prefixes 
to their names is to milk he-goats ; there is neither 
honour nor profit." This characteristic effusion 
evoked an indignant remonstrance from Milnes, to 
whom Tennyson again wrote : " What has so jaun- 
diced your good-natured eyes as to mistake harmless 
banter for insolent irony?" and promised his help. 
The promise w'as fulfilled by the contribution above 
mentioned. These stanzas developed in after years 
into the lyrical melodrama, which was Tennyson's fa- 
vourite among his own poems, and the development 
was due to a remark of Sir John Simeon's to the effect 
that the lines suggested a story which ought to be 
told. The edition of 1855 gave the poem as continu- 
ous ; the edition of the following year contained some 
new passages. In subsequent issues the poem was 
divided into two, and eventually into three parts, 
and styled " a monodrama. " 

J/ai/ci was greeted with an almost unanimous chorus 
of disapproval. Readers, critical and uncritical alike, 
complained that it was unreal, fantastic, had " the 
serious defect of leaving one in a painful state of con- 
fusion as to the limits of the sane and the insane ; "* 
the chief charge of all being that it was an inde- 
fensible defence of war. As a psychological study of 
a difficult subject, it was natural that J/(7//</ should be 

* To this it might be replied that the same charge may be brought 
against Ilamlct, and that in nature no defining line can be drawn. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 8/ 

misunderstood and unappreciated. The critical judg- 
ments are not now arrayed against the author's fa- 
vourite work as they were at first, but it still remains 
and will remain the least favoured by his readers. In 
many respects it must, I think, be regarded as the 
most dramatic of Tennyson's poems, dramatic as the 
presentation not of the characters of a group of indi- 
viduals and their mutual interaction, but as reflecting 
the varying moods of a single person of eager temper 
wrought upon by violent passions in a period itself 
full of exciting actions, of nerve-stirring emotions and 
of arousing ideas.* Maud is a lyrical monodrama, 
and into the lyrics which compose it Tennyson poured 
much of his strongest feeling, many of the thoughts 
which came from the closest corner of his brain. It 
is a sincere, a characteristic utterance, a real tran- 
script of the poet's mind ; hence his love for it,f hence, 
too, its interest to students of his poetry. Whatever 
regard Tennyson in his poetry paid to the conventions 
— and as an artist he was to some extent their prisoner 
— he is here moving with a freer, more natural step, 
speaking to please himself, and himself alone. The 
subject, too, is a favourite one. Maud may fairly be 

* Mr. Knowles quotes Tennyson as saying: "It should be 
called Matid, or The Madness. It is slightly akin to Havilet. No 
other poem (a monotone with plenty of change and no weariness) 
has been made into a drama where successive phases of passion in 
one person take the place of successive persons. The whole of 
the stanzas where he is mad in Bedlam, from " Dead, long dead " 
to " Deeper, ever so little deeper," were written in twenty minutes, 
and some mad doctor wrote to me that nothing since Shakespeare 
has been so good for madness as this." — Nineteenth Century, 
January, 1893. 

I " I've always said that Maud and Guinevere were the finest 
things I've written." 



88 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

compared with the two Locksley Halls, the poems of 
his youth and age that came most directly from the 
heart, taking them as a single work for the purpose of 
the comparison. In both the undercurrent of his na- 
ture becomes for the time the uppercurrent. Each is 
the stor)'^ of a lost love ; in both there are noble as- 
pirations, disappointed hopes, a touch of scorn, the 
outcome of such unfulfilled longing. The hero of 
each suffers the same sharp reverse, both would mix 
with action to keep at bay the tiger despair, both are 
critics of life, who find it an unweeded garden ; in 
both the vein of bitterness gives place to more self- 
honouring resolve. 

" Follow light and do the right, for man can half control his doom, 
Till you find the deathless angel seated in the vacant tomb," 

is a counsel at one with the resolve of the hero of 
Maud, 

" It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill. 
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind, 
I embrace the purpose of God and the doom assigned." 

For the rest, Maud passes now and then from the 
sphere of poetry into that of rhetoric, but in the best 
' of the lyrics there is much of Tennyson's best, the im- 
perishable beauty that belongs to the musical expres- 
sion of sincere emotion. For a defence of the battle- 
ardour of Maud, we may read the Epilogue to The 
Charge of the Heavy Brigade. But a defence is unne- 
cessary. Only the purblind moralist who knows 
nothing of life can fail to recognise that terrible as are 
its accompaniments of suffering and horror, by war are 
evoked the noblest elements of human character as 
well as its most debasing ; that in the furnace of its 
fires men are tried as gold in the refining pot, and 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 89 

that not seldom has it discovered beauties and hero- 
isms, an unselfishness and devotion, the existence of 
which in self-seeking times of peace the most subtle 
observer could not even have suspected. 

Maud is not a world-poem ; it is not even a poem of 
great imaginative range or far-reaching power, but it 
finds the vulnerable points in modern civilisation, and 
has its place with those true works of art which will 
not leave us at rest with ourselves until we know our 
minds and sound the real depth of our feelings. 

In addition to Maud, this volume of 154 pages con- 
tained The Charge of the Light Brigade, Will, The Daisy, 
Ode on the Death of the Duke of JVellington, Lines to the 
Rev. F. D. Maurice,* The Brook, and the Letters. 

Of the remaining poems few words are called 
for here. The Brook takes its rightful place among 
the English idylls, a vignette of English country- 
life, peaceful and sweet. The Daisy is a record 
of the poet's wedding journey, brought in after 
years to mind by a faded flower. The lines To 
Frederick Denison Maurice,\ " the truest Christian he 
ever knew," recall a controversy of the past and pic- 
ture the surroundings of the poet's home in the Isle of 
Wight. The Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington 
and The Charge of the Light Brigade, Tennyson's two 
most famous patriotic poems, need no comment. The 
early printed versions of each underwent even more 
than the customary revision, the labour of the file, and 

* Maurice had dedicated his Theological Essays to Tennyson. 

f Even this short poem was considerably altered in later ver- 
sions. Lushing-ton, comparing it with The Daisy, remarked of 
the latter : " How the simple change in the last line from a dactyl 
to an amphibrachys changes a mere experiment into a discovery 
in metre." 



go A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

in their present form are very different from the orig- 
inals. 

As a whole, the volume may be noted as containing 
a number of new experiments in metre. Matid, the 
Ode on the Death of the Duke, The Daisy, the lines To 
Maurice, Will, all exhibit Tennyson moving in hitherto 
untrodden metrical paths. I do not know that any 
English poet has employed and achieved success in 
so many and various measures. 



CHAPTER V. 

Among the books published by William Caxton at 
the first printing-press set up in England, at West- 
minster, was Sir Thomas Malory's Mortc d'Arthut'- in 
the year 1485. Malory was a compiler of 
genius, with a real skill in language and idylls of 
a real feeling for the spirit of the old le- the King, 
gends which he attempts to unify. He 1859-85. 
so alters, arranges, and combines the 
stories, so nobly conceives the cycle of the Arthurian 
chivalric romances, that at his hands the whole is 
clothed, and indeed for the first time, with almost 
epic interest, the interest of simple yet heroic actions 
on an ample field, unified by their relation to a great 
central figure. Into the neglected treasury of chiv- 
alric legend — neglected from the time that the Renais- 
sance revived men's sympathies with classic ideals 
and the myths of older days — into this treasury of 
chivalric legend, neglected and even scorned by so 
great and true a poet as Chaucer, Malory stepped bold- 
ly, and committing a splendid theft from contempo- 
rary or older writers on the Continent, made himself 
the undisputed possessor in English prose of the story 
of King Arthur and his knights. In his version the 
story is at once more human, more tragic, more convinc- 
ing, and more natural than in that of any of the earlier 
compilers ; and for this reason it is that the more re- 
cent poets, and Tennyson among them, follow Malory, 
except in some instances, in preference to any of his 



92 A TENNYSON TRIMER. 

predecessors in other languages who handled the 
same subject. And the name of his predecessors is 
legion and of many nationalities, divided from each 
other by long centuries. 

The origin of the Arthur story is lost in the 
mists of remote Celtic tradition. There are traces 
of a hero named Arthur even before the time 
in which we hear of him as a king who lived 
and reigned in the sixth century, and of whom the 
tale was told that he united all the petty princedoms 
under his sovereign rule, and as the champion of his 
people and of the Christian faith long resisted the 
invading bands of the Saxon heathen. But the earli- 
est references to Arthur in the lays of the Welsh 
bards celebrate him as a valiant hero only, and it is 
not until we come to the accounts of Nennius,* and 
especially to those of Geoffrey of Monmouth, that 
the romantic and marvellous elements enter, that we 
hear of him as rex quondavi rexquc futurus, and that 
the legends begin to take the shape and display the 
character with which we are now familiar. To the 
influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth's version, f com- 
piled according to his own words from " a certain 
very ancient book in the British tongue," may be 
traced the inexhaustible harvest of chivalric romances 
which grew up around the person of the mythic 

* Popularly supposed to have been a writer of the seventh cen- 
tury, but really much later — probably the twelfth. 

f Geoffrey of Monmouth was consecrated Bishop of St. Asaph 
in 1 152. Before that date he composed the Chronicon sive His- 
toria Britotiuin, a work which the author professes to have trans- 
lated from a chronicle entitled Brut of Brcnhiiied, a history of 
the kings of Britain, found in Brittany, and given him by Walter 
Calenius, Archdeacon of Oxford. 



A TENNYSON PRIAIER. 93 

British prince. How far Geoffrey may have been 
the conduit pipe through which real historical facts 
were conveyed is, indeed, difficult to determine, but 
that the greater part of his work is fiction, partly, 
perhaps, even fiction of his own invention, is more 
than probable. With him the legends entered upon 
the period of their Christian and chivalric treatment 
in the metrical romances of the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries, both in French and (later) in English. 
In these romances Arthur becomes the ideal knight, 
the founder of the noble brotherhood of the Round 
Table. A king of mysterious lineage and endowed 
with supernatural gifts, he keeps his court at Caer- 
leon, and from thence his knights go forth on knight- 
ly quests,' to succour the distressed and helpless, to 
protect women, and do service in their honour, and to 
venture themselves in every heroic contest which may 
issue in glory and the triumph of justice and virtue. 
The whole atmosphere of these romances is charged 
with enchantment and mysticism, the imagination 
ranges freely, and the bare outlines of the original 
history are by this time completely lost in the colour 
and variety of the new poetic setting. It will be 
seen, then, that the Arthurian cycle had its origin in 
remote antiquity, its germ in ancient Celtic tradition; 
that, after it had already undergone many and impor- 
tant variations, and received accretions from vari- 
ous sources, it passed, mainly through the version of 
Geoffrey of Monmouth, into the hands of the French 
trouveres* and German minnesingers, and returned 
again to England to find its way into ballad litera- 

* The greatest by far was Chretien de Troies of the twelfth 
century. 



94 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

ture, and eventually into the Morte iT Arthur of Mal- 
ory, Tennyson's main source for the Idylls. 

There is yet another source to which Tennyson is 
indebted.* In 1S49, Lady Charlotte Guest translated 
into English a Welsh collection, entitled the Maiu'/io- 
gion, containing tales not to be found in Malory, but 
of about the same date, the fourteenth and fifteenth 
centuries. Although these stories were in all proba- 
bility also originally translated from the French, they 
display a character of their own which distinguishes 
them from the stories of the Morte cV Arthur. Mat- 
thew Arnold and other critics have found in these 
chivalric versions of the Arthurian legend traces of a 
greater antiquity. " These are no mediaeval person- 
ages," Arnold writes in his Celtic Literature; " they 
belong to an older pagan mj-thological world. The 
first thing that strikes one in reading the Mabinogion 
is how evidently the mediaeval story-teller is pillaging 
an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the 
secret ; he is like a peasant building his hut on the 
site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus : he builds, but 
what he builds is full of materials of which he knows 
not the history, or knows by glimmering tradition 
merely ; stones ' not of this building,' but of an older 
architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical." 
The English literary history of the Arthurian legends 
from Malory to Tennyson is rather a curious history 
of projects than of achievements. The great dra- 
matic period of our literature produced one play only 
on an Arthurian subject. The Alisfortunes of Arthur^ 
presented at Gray's Inn before the Queen in 15S7, 
the author, Thomas Hughes. References to the le- 
gends occur in a few passages in Shakespeare, but 
* For the story of Enid. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 95 

his only connexion with them — a bond of the slightest 
— is to be found in the fact that the plots of King Lear 
and of Cyiiibcliiic were originally taken from the 
chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, though Shake- 
speare himself derived them from Holinshed. With 
Spenser, gleams of the Arthurian romance shine 
through the texture of his strangely-woven song, 
where Aristotelian scheme, classic myth, and Italian 
verse-form are the conspicuous elements; but Spen- 
ser was not destined to unify the Arthurian legends. 
A greater than Spenser came near doing so. 

In his youth, Milton tells us, " I betook me among 
those lofty fables and romances which recount in 
solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood, founded by 
our victorious kings, and from thence had in renown 
over all Christendom." He had for long in con- 
templation an epic poem whose subject should be 
taken from ancient British history,* but a higher 
argument claimed him, and the Arthuriad remained 
unwritten. Dr3'den, too, contemplated an epic poem 
on a national theme, but hesitated, doubtful whether 
to choose as subject Arthur conquering the Saxons, 
or Edward the Black Prince, in his Spanish wars. 
The times, however, were not ripe for such an effort. 
As Scott writes: 

" Dryden in immortal strain 
Had raised the Table Round again, 
But that a ribald king and court 
Bade him toil on to make them sport." 

The worthy knight, Sir Richard Blackmore, was 
the first to achieve the distinction of a completed 

* See his Latin poems, Mansus and Epitaphittiii Damonis; also 
Paradise Lost, Bk. ix. 20, for the reasons for .a different choice. 



96 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Arthurian epic. " In leisure hours he dealt in epic 
song," and produced several poems of epic pro- 
portions, if not of epic dignity, among them Prince 
Arthur and King Arthur; but Blackmore failed to 
make good his claim to be England's national poet, 
and it was not until after the dawn of the Neo-Ro- 
mantic epoch, of which Chatterton was the true har- 
binger, that the long-delayed poetic justice was done 
to the ancient British legends. The life of these 
legends was renewed in poetry and art by the Ro- 
mantic revival, and the old interest in them was once 
more awakened. Scott in his Bridal of Tricnnain 
treated an episode from the romances. Heber, Words- 
worth, Lytton, and others found in them stimulus for 
the imagination, and there were few among the poets 
who were Tennyson's contemporaries for whom the 
spell of the old enchantment was not too strong to 
be resisted. 

Subjects drawn from the Arthurian story appear in 
several of Tennyson's early poems : in the 1832 vol- 
ume The Lady of Shalott, Sir Galahad and Sir Lancelot 
and Queen Guinevere in 1842. The Palace of Art con- 
tains a reference to Arthur — " mythic Uther's deeply 
wounded son ;" and elsewhere may be found traces of 
the effect made by the beauty of these ancient legends 
upon his sensitive temperament. That the ambition 
to weave the Arthurian legends into a poetic whole 
was early cherished by him is evidenced in The Epic, 
which, published among Xh^ Poems oi 1842, introduced 
the fragment, J/(?;'/<' d' Arthur, where the intention* to 
give a permanent poetic form to the Arthurian history 
is indicated : 

* Or its tentative accomplishment. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 97 

" ' You know,' said Frank, ' he burnt 

His epic, his King Arthur, some twelve books.* " * 

In this fragment a new note is struck, the pre-Raph- 
aelite mediaeval style of The Lady of Shalott and Sir 
Galahad has given place to a manner worthy of epic 
material. The Mortc d' Arthur, then, opens the long 
period of his life during which Tennyson was more or 
less occupied with his epic scheme. f This is the 
poem referred to by Landor, who wrote in 1837 : "A 
Mr. Moreton, a young man of rare judgment, read to 
me a manuscript by Mr. Tennyson, very different in 
style from his printed poems. The subject is the 
death of Arthur. It is more Homeric than any poem 
of our time, and rivals some of the noblest parts of 
the Odysseay 

For more than a decade we hear no more of the de- 
sign, but in 1857 was published a small volume, already 
m.Q.nt\onQ.d,\E/iid and JViiniie ; or, The True and the False, 
which had a very brief spell of public life, being im- 
mediately withdrawn from publication. In June of the 
next year, 1858, Clough " heard Tennyson read a third 
Arthur poem — the detection of Guinevere, and the 
last interview with Arthur." This, entitled Guinevere, 
together with three other poems, Enid, Vivien, and 



* Mrs. Ritchie quotes Tennyson as saying : " When I was twenty- 
four, I meant to write a whole great poem on it (the Arthurian 
story), and began it in the Morte d' Arthur. I said I should do it 
in twenty years, but the reviews stopped me. By Arthur I always 
meant the soul, and by the Round Table the passions and capaci- 
ties of a man. There is no grander subject in the world than King 
Arthur." 

\ A long visit to Caerleon on Usk prepared the way for the de 
scriptions of scenery in the Idylls. 



98 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Elaine* appeared in 1859 2i% Idylls of the King, the first 
occasion upon which the name was employed. Three 
years later the dedication to the memory of the Prince 
Consort was prefixed to the poems, which remained 
unaltered, save for a few unimportant verbal changes. 
After another interval of seven years, in 1869, four 
new poems were added to the already published idylls 
— T/ic Coming of Arthur, The Holy Grail, Felleas and 
Ettarre, and The Passing of Arthur. The last named 
was an extended version of the Morte d' Arthur of 
1842. In 187 1 The Last Tournament appeared in the 
Contemporary Reviejci, a.nd in 1872 Garcth and Lynctte.] 
After yet another long interval, Balinand Balan, which 
serves as an introduction to Aferlin and Vivien, was 
published in 1885, and in 1888 Geraint and Enid was 
divided into two parts, the first being named The 
Marriage of Gcraint, and the second retaining the 
former title. 

Such is the external history of the 'Idylls of the 
King. The history of the author's purpose and its 
gradual development, as indicated in the additions 
and alterations, made from time to time in the text of 
successive editions, can here be but briefly sketched. 
Through fully half a century, as I have shown, the 
Arthurian story had possession of Tennyson's mind. 
Throughout that period it seems as if he were slowly 
feeling his way towards the best solution of the diffi- 
cult problem — how to create a living interest in the 
old-world legend, how to re-tell these tales of centu- 
ries ago, that they might touch the modern mind, 

* Afterwards entitled Gei-aint and Enid, J\ferlin mid Vivien, 
Lancelot and Elaine, Arthur and Guinevere. 

f The lines " To the Queen" were added as a conclusion to the 
series in this year. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 99 

affect with real power the men who live the altered 
life of to-day. 

Although the subject was in many respects suitable 
for a great English poem, and offered practically an 
open field which any poet might make his own pos- 
session, were his genius equal to the task, the choice 
of method was a difficult one. The Arthurian ro- 
mances embody the ideals of chivalry, but they were 
never true to the real life of any age, and some indeed 
have thought that no treatment, however skilful, could 
give them more than a poetic-antiquarian interest : 

" No part have these wan legends in the sun. 

Whose glory lightens Greece and gleams on Rome. 
Their elders live ; but these — their day is done ; 
Their records written on the winds, in foam 
Fly down the wind, and darkness takes them home. 
What Homer saw, what Virgil dreamed, was truth 
And died not, being divine ; but whence, in sooth, 
Might shades that never lived win deathless youth ?" 

It was too late by many centuries to build out of 
these misty legends the heroic epic, whose readers 
should find in Arthur a real king, and follow with be- 
lieving, beating heart the record of his knightly deeds. 
Whatever else may be said of Tennyson, we must 
willingly grant the wisdom of his choice of the only 
way in which the material could be handled with any 
measure of success in these later days. An allegorical 
treatment of the romance of Arthur was the sole pos- 
sible treatment for a poet of the nineteenth century. 
Nor did the romances present any features incompat- 
ible with such treatment ; they lent themselves readily 
to it. Already around the person of Arthur had col- 
lected many myths of symbolic import, through which 
inner meanings ran, and the whole story had been 



lOO A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

treated by Malory in the spirit of one who, while he 
tells a particular tale, relates a chapter of universal 
human history. 

The idea of an allegorical treatment of the Arthu- 
rian story was, I think, present with Tennyson from 
the first, but his conception of the whole scheme was 
in the beginning far from definite, and the presence 
of the symbolism is hardly felt in the four Idylls of 
1859. He was not sure how far the allegory might be 
justly carried. By Arthur, as he tells us, he always 
meant the Soul, but it was not until 1869, when he 
published Pelleas and Ettarre and The Holy Grail, that 
the allegoric purpose is clearly present. In the address 
to the Queen, which concludes the whole, and was 
published in 1872, he sets forth the aim of his work, 
and speaks of it as an 

" old imperfect tale, 
Nezv-old and shadowing Sense at war with Sozil 
Rather than that gray king, whose name, a ghost. 
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak. 
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still ; or him 
Of Geoffrey's book, or him of Malleor's, one 
Touch'd by the adulterous finger of a time 
That hover'd between war and wantonness, 
And crownings and dethronements." 

The constant revision to which, almost until the 
last, the various poems were subjected was designed 
to emphasise their true character, and to bind them 
into a closer unity. After the publication of Balin 
and Balan, in 1885, Tennyson wrote but one other 
poem, a lyric, on an Arthurian subject. In Merlin 
a?id the Gleam the poet seems to allegorise his own life 
and teaching, and, in his faith that the ideal is indeed 
the vera lux that must lead the world, once more 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. lOI 

restores the hope that in the failure of the Table 
Round had seemed ahnost wholly quenched. 

I have said that Tennyson's treatment of the Ar- 
thurian romances was the only possible one — a frank 
literary and symbolic handling of the legendary cycle ; 
it remains to ask, Was it successful? I shall not stay 
to discuss the wisdom of the choice of title, nor to 
enter upon the barren logomachy, so long waged by 
the critics, whether or no the poems constitute an 
epic. Like all Tennyson's poems, the lyrics excepted, 
the Idylls of the King have the elements of strength 
and of weakness, we may say the elements of the 
author's characteristic strength, the elements of his 
characteristic weakness. The cardinal defect, inher- 
ent in the subject, a lack of unity, was precisely the 
defect which the limitations of Tennyson's genius ren- 
dered him least able to repair. It would have been 
repaired by Milton had he essayed the task ; I believe 
no English poet since Milton possessed the architec- 
tural faculty, the unifying imagination essential to 
complete success. Tennyson's Idylls are a series of 
pictures — as their name indeed implies ; there is no 
link strong enough to bind the constituent parts into 
an organic whole. The figure of Arthur is too dim, 
too undefined to serve as centre to the movement of 
the various poems ; he comes and passes away, but his 
influence is slight. Within the work itself, it can 
hardly be said that there is " a beginning, a middle 
point, and an end," as Aristotle justly demanded in an 
epic. We are conscious that many more such poems 
might have been added, that some might have been 
omitted without serious disturbance to the poem as a 
whole. To say so is to say what cannot be asserted 
of an organic growth, to which nothing can be added 



I02 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

and from which nothing can be taken away. Yet in 
the room of unity we have symmetry^ a delicate balance 
and proportion, artistic and admirable, with which we 
may well be content. 

Turning from the poem as it might have been to a 
consideration of it as given to us, the most serious de- 
fect arises out of the unfortunate contrast between the 
cold, colourless, faultless Arthur and the human- 
hearted though sinning Lancelot. It is not enough to 
say that, viewed in its spiritual meanings, the compar- 
ison must be in favour of the blameless king. The 
story affects us before the symbolism is apparent, and 
our sympathies are enlisted on the side of flesh and 
blood, and cannot again be alienated. Our instincts 
teach us that Lancelot is the nobler type of manhood. 
The story, if the poem is to be perfect, must be com- 
plete and interesting in itself. But the necessities of 
the symbolism clash at times and cannot be harmo- 
nised with the tale, and w^hen " we come suddenly upon 
the moral, it gives us a shock of unpleasant surprise, 
a kind of grit, as when one's teeth close on a bit of 
gravel in a dish of strawberries and cream." This and 
the inevitable sense of depression which the failure of 
its ideals, the final ruin of Arthur's once noble court, 
leaves within the mind, are faults without remedy. 
But the compensations are not a few — such, indeed, as 
Tennyson rarely failed to supply in any work. In the 
Holy Grail and in Guinevere^ as in Elaine and indeed 
in almost all the poems, there are as noble passages as 
any to be found in the whole range of English poetry. 
The felicitous rendering, too, of natural scenery, and 
its equally felicitous use for purposes of illustration, 
are as conspicuous as ever. No better example can 
be adduced than the often-quoted lines that follow : 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. IO3 

" So dark a fore-thought roll'd about his brain, 
As on a dull day in an ocean cave 
The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall 
In silence." 

The greatest artist in colour among modern poets is 
present in the Idylls from the first line to the last. 

Of the allegory itself, no strict interpretation is pos- 
sible, nor is it desirable. But it may be outlined as 
the history of the soul of man in its warfare upon 
earth.* In Arthur, who builds and reigns in Camelot, 
we have symbolised the soul and the city that the 
genius of man has erected for himself — the whole or- 
dered social fabric, the human institutions built up to 
serve his needs. In Guinevere the beauty of the 
world of sense is typified, the beauty which the soul 
would fain make its own, finding in it a winning, inex- 
haustible charm. But in the world of sense, with all 
its charm, there resides a principle which is antagonis- 
tic to the spirit ; while it attracts it also repels, and 
the problem which man has to face lies here. He is 
a citizen of two worlds, a spiritual and a material, and 
while this life lasts a perfect reconciliation is impos- 
sible. Arthur comes and establishes his kingdom upon 
earth, and for a time all goes well. The ideals of the 
soul are slowly but surely organizing a human after 
the pattern of a divine society. But the difficulties are 
many, human weaknesses and frailties hinder the evo- 
lution of a perfect reign of love and law, the hostile 
forces are ceaselessly at work. In Gareth and Lytiette, 
in Balin and Balan, in Geraint and Enid the warfare is 

* " The whole is the dream of man coming into practical life 
and ruined by one sin. Birth is a mystery and death is a mystery, 
and in the midst lies the table-land of life, and its struggle and per- 
formance." — Conversation of Tennyson quoted by Mrs. Ritchie. 



104 A TENNYSON PklMER. 

mainttiincd between the spiritual and material influ- 
ences in the heart of man, and the spiritual are still 
undefeated. But more powerful forces of evil enter. 
These in Merlin and Vivien and in Pelleas and Ettarre 
are triumphant, and the shadow of its approaching 
dissolution begins to lower over the once splendid 
court. In The Holy Grail is symbolised the quest for 
the true spiritual principles, the true religion which 
throughout the centuries has inspired the noblest 
souls. But many of the seekers for the Grail are led 
astray by wandering fires, and only those in whose 
hearts burns the flame of pure devotion attain to a 
sight of it. Lancelot is the type of perfect manhood, 
in whom the love of earthly beauty has not been sub- 
dued until too late by a vision of what is still more 
lovely. With the sin of Lancelot and Guinevere the 
end draws near ; the winter of failure, the final dark- 
ness approaches, and the Round Table, " which was an 
image of the mighty world," is dissolved. But though 
dissolved, the ideal at which it aimed shines as it ever 
shone ; no failure can dim the brightness of its chal- 
lenging fires. Arthur, the king that was, the king 
that will be, is not dead ; and in Merlin and the Gleam, 
though not a part of the poem, the allegory finds its 
true conclusion. The poet's last word is one of en- 
couragement : 

" After it, follow it, 
Follow the gleam." 

The Idylls of the King, when criticism has spoken its 
last word, may fairly be called a great poem ; perhaps 
the greatest poem since the Faerie Queen, in the order 
to which it belongs. For those, indeed, who value 
breadth and scope of conception in art above all 
beauty of expression, all exquisiteness of detail ; who 
demand authentic warrant in the idea for each word of 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. I05 

the language that conveys it ; who refuse to diction, 
be it verse or prose, the right to shine in itself, be- 
lieving that in its highest reach it challenges no atten- 
tion, but, itself unseen, is but the perfect mirror of the 
thought or feeling it presents — for those, in a word, who 
set the whole above the parts that compose it, the 
Idylls can never rank with the supreme poetry of the 
world. But it will be conceded by the future, as it 
has already been conceded in the present, that few of 
the qualities of enduring poetry are here unrepresent- 
ed. Steeped in the golden splendours of an heroic 
past the legends keep their intrinsic power to charm, 
while, in their modern form, the magic and melody and 
mystery in which they seem to float diffused, the 
mediaeval glamour of a world of old romance that 
pervades the whole, the deep spiritual significance of 
the allegory — with these the poet weaves for every 
reader the spells of an enchanted land. Let us not, 
therefore, speak of the grandeur of the Idylls of the 
King ; let us rather speak of their splendour, their 
luxuriance of colour, their exquisite grace of word and 
phrase, their pictorial magnificence, the un'dying 
charm of their high and truthful eloquence. Beauti- 
ful, indeed, they are, yet with limitations ; jafA«;rar ra 
KoXkiara — perfection is a difficult mark to hit. 

" Tennyson's plays," said George Eliot, speaking of 
Queen Mary and Harold, "run Shakespere's close." 
When one hears criticism of this kind from a writer 
of genius, one is inclined to say, Let us 
henceforth forever dispense with criti- Enoch 
cism. Such criticism is pestilential, it goes Arden,* etc. 
far to destroy all standards of excellence °° • 
in literature, all sense of distinctions; it 

* The title of the volume was originally Idylls of the Hearth, but it 
was altered while in the press. It was dedicated to Mrs. Tennyson. 



I06 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

goes far to create a positive distaste for even the best 
literature. " Enoch Ardeti," said Mr. Dawson, an 
ardent admirer of Tennyson, " is his noblest and 
best " poem. " I find in it almost every quality of 
the poet, true sympathy and all the rest. There is >wt 
a fine word in it." We are growing more and more 
accustomed to outrageous insanities in criticism; we 
are not now surprised to find it asserted that the 
quality of Shakespere's dramatic art is matched in 
the last new play, that the splendours of Milton's 
prose are reproduced in the trivial clevernesses of a 
magazine article. That a critic should say of Enoch 
Arden, therefore, that "there is not a fine word in it," 
does not surprise us ; though the truth is just the op- 
posite of this, that it is a poem in which a simple 
subject is adorned with all " the fine words," all the 
wealth of language at the poet's command. It is, as 
Mr. Bagehot long ago said, a perfect instance of or- 
nate or decorative as opposed to pure art. 

" While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas, 
Or often journeying landward ; for in truth 
Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean-spoil 
In ocean-smelling osier, and his face, 
Rough-reddened with a thousand winter gales, 
Not only to the market-cross were known, 
But in the leafy lanes behind the down, 
Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp, 
And peacock yew-tree of the lonely Hall, 
Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering." 

"So much," as Mr. Bagehot said, "has not often 
been made of selling fish." We are presented with a 
portrait of an unreal sailor, painted in unreal colours, 
upon an unreal canvas, "a sailor crowded all over 
with "ornament and illustration." The key to this 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 107 

poem is to be found in a letter of Fitzgerald's, written 
just before its composition — "Alfred wants a story to 
treat, being full of poetry with nothing to put it in. " — 
The subject when found was all but lost beneath the 
magnificence of its " poetic" treatment. Enoch Arden 
is the best example that can be selected from the 
author's works of that weakness in his artistic nature 
which seemingly made it impossible for him to trust 
his subject, to permit it to speak for itself. But the 
grand distinction of the greatest artists is this, that 
their action predominates over their expression, that 
they regard the whole more than the parts, the idea, 
therefore, above the language ; and their aim is ac- 
complished not in the luxuriance of their imagery, 
the wealth of their colour, or the multiplicity of their 
illustration, but, as I have elsewhere phrased it, when 
they leave upon the reader's mind one pure, simple, 
affecting outline, one undying image of perfect fea- 
ture. In this poem of Tennyson, as in many other of 
his poems — here, I think, pre-eminently — he errs by 
overlaying a simple and pathetic tale by splendour of 
language altogether alien to it, by whose instrumen- 
tality it is removed out of the real world of things as 
they are into an altogether unreal world of things as 
they are not. The action is not permitted to control 
the expression, but is really subordinated to it ; is 
made the occasion of a magnificent display of verbal 
and pictorial wealth. When one thinks of Enoch 
Arden, one thinks first of that matchless description 
of the island in the tropics upon which the ship- 
wrecked sailor is thrown : a description, as I say, 
matchless, but quite unessential to the story, quite 
out of keeping with the feelings of the shipwrecked 
sailor, a purple patch which distracts the mind from 



Io8 A TENNYSON I'RIMER. 

the main business of the piece, wliich is to tell a sim- 
ple, pathetic tale of simple fisher-folk. 

It is a noteworthy fact that this poem is among the 
most popular, if not the most popular, of Tennyson's 
works ; it certainly has been more frequently chosen 
for translation into other languages than any other of 
his poems — a proof, if any were required, how few are 
the lovers of pure, of restrained, of classic art even 
among the readers of poetry. The popularity of 
Enoch Arden is comparable to the popularity of the 
May Queen, a poem so full of false sentiment and 
false pathos as to be painful to a reader of any fine- 
ness of sensibility ; so much so, that I doubt whether 
such a reader ever thinks of turning to it again after 
the first reading. Think of an artist in the great 
style, like Milton, indulging in these puling senti- 
mentalities ! But it was with poems such as these 
that Tennyson made his irresistible appeal to the wide 
circle of his uncritical admirers, an appeal which may 
be compared to that made by Millais with his popular 
pictures. 

A noticeable contrast to Enoch Arden is the first 
of the dialect poems. The Northern Farmer, published 
in the same volume. This is a study of real life ; 
here the patient, observing eye has been at work, here 
the artist for once conceals his art, and speaks the 
real language of men. The poems in dialect are 
more dramatic, because infinitely more true to life, 
than any work can ever be of the order to which 
Enoch Arden belongs. They are remarkable, too, as 
revealing an unexpected humorist in the aristocratic 
poet, a sympathetic humorist, who was at home in the 
rural cottage as much as in the courts of princes. 
The Northern Farmer was another proof of the extra- 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. IO9 

ordinary versatility of Tennyson's genius, and in 
some respects the most striking poem in this volume. 
Aylmcrs Field, of which the story was told to the 
author by his friend Woolner, the artist, is redeemed 
from slightness by the intensity and fervour of its 
rhetoric, culminating in the funeral sermon. In Sea 
Dreams the decorative method employed in Enoch 
Ardcii is again conspicuous, but the theme is trivial 
and the treatment almost languid. But in TitJiouus^ 
the old mastery, the old, inimitable skill is once more 
apparent. It is in the classical studies that Tenny- 
son's art seems faultless. With all their exquisite 
beauty of form there is a dignity, a reserve apparent 
which adds immeasurably to their charm. Ulysses, 
Tithonus, Lucretius, and Detneter are something more 
than delicately woven dreams, phantasies in colour 
and sound. Akin to The Lady of Shalott, they yet 
possess something higher ; here is the Greek sharp- 
ness of outline, with the Greek simplicity of motive ; 
here is a chiselled perfection of phrase. The classi- 
cal studies are, in my judgment, the poems of the 
author which give us by far the highest sense of his 
power, whether intellectual or poetic. 

Of the remaining poems in this volume, The Grand- 
mother maybe noted as a favourite with the poet him- 
self, and The Flower a.s 3. not unnatural protest against 
the fickle admirers and critics who found nothing in 
the poet's work to reverence until it became the ob- 
ject of imitation, and then, again, when " most could 
raise the flower, since all had got the seed," found it 
of trivial value. The other pieces were The Voyage, 
The Ringlet (afterwards omitted), The Sailor Boy, 

* First appeared in the second number of the first volume of 
Cornhill {lito). 



no A TENNYSON FRIMER. 

previously published — in a Miscellany, " The Victoria 
Rcgia" — in 1861, T/ie Islet, a.nd The Attempts at Classic 
Afetres in Quantity, which had appeared in the Cornhill 
for December, 1863. In these last Tennyson's delicate 
perception of form enabled him to reproduce for 
English readers the musical aroma of some of the 
most complex classical metres, never before so ex- 
quisitely rendered. To them we may here add the 
Sapphic stanza, written for Professor Jebb's Primer of 
Greek Literature, in which, as he tells us, the genuine 
Greek cadence is preserved : 

" Faded every violet, all the roses ; 

Gone the glorious promise, and the victim, 
Broken in this anger of Aphrodite, 
Yields to the victor." 

It may be said of this volume that it was a series of 
experiments, most of which were comparative fail- 
ures. In the domestic idyll Tennyson was not work- 
ing the true vein of his genius. Enoch Arden, Aylniers 
Field, and Sea Dreams were subjects which Words- 
worth might have treated, but the very simplicity of 
the themes here chosen jars with the jewelled phras- 
ing, the ornate manner of Tennyson's setting. The 
artist is too conspicuously present in his creations. 

Versatility and growth in power were the signal 
features of Tennyson's art and artistic life. That the 
author of The Miller's Daughter should become the 
author of The Revenge, that in the brain of the poet of 

Claribel there was hidden the poet of Liicre- 
The Dramas, tins, that Queen Mary and Ifarold a.nd Becket 

belong to the same life-history as The Lotos- 
Eaters, The Talking Oak, and Locksley Hall — this is a 
source of natural admiration and wonder. This also 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. Ill 

is the true point of view for the critics who are lovers 
of Tennyson, the point of view from which his great- 
ness is most clearly discernible. While we stand at 
this point we can hardly praise too highly. But to 
forget that there are other points of view is to forget 
the true function of criticism, which is to draw distinc- 
tions, to insist upon distinctions, and to show wherein 
they exist. Splendidly versatile as was Tennyson's 
genius, the critic must say, then, he was not successful 
as a dramatist : two things stood in the path of his 
success. The genius of the time was against him ; 
the seclusion in which he chose to live his life was 
even more against him. Had any large share of the 
dramatic faculty fallen to his lot, these hostile influ- 
ences might in some degree have been overcome ; as 
it was, the discerning observer marks with surprise 
not, indeed, his failure, but the measure of his success. 
I have already indicated that we need not look for our 
author's strength in breadth and scope of conception, 
in imaginative synthesis, but in the balance of his 
judgment, in his analytic subtlety, in his assimilative 
powers, in the rich accessories of his artistic detail. 
To the most ordinary observer the plays are evidently 
full of fine things ; for example, the second scene in the 
third act of Queen Mary is grandly conceived and 
executed, as is also the concluding scene in the play, 
but this cannot satisfy us ; fine things do not make, 
they have never yet made, a drama. We must ask, 
Are Tennyson's plays dramatically conceived ; that is, 
do they find their natural home upon the stage ? Is 
the action an inevitable march ? Is the characterisa- 
tion vital ? Is the effect one and indivisible ? These 
questions cannot be answered in the affirmative, and 
yet in these we have only a few of the essentials 



112 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

of a drama. The plays of Tennyson in any real 
meaning of the word drama are failures ; we may 
speak of "them thus frankly. His admirers will tell us 
it is not so ; they will tell us that Tennyson is a great 
dramatist, that, as George Henry Lewes said, " The 
critics of to-morrow will unanimously declare Alfred 
Tennyson to be a great dramatic genius." It may be 
so, but some of us, when we read the tragedy of Mary 
Tudor, will do so more frequently in the version of 
Sir Aubrey de Vere than in that of the greater poet, 
and will content ourselves with saying that, although 
Tennyson's dramas are indisputably failures, they are 
quite as indisputably charged with high interest, with 
evidences of fine literary tact, with intellectual force ; 
and, above all, we will connect them with the growing 
power on the part of the author of holding his hand 
as he acquired a stronger because a severer style. 
The years devoted by Tennyson to the composi- 
tion of his dramatic works left their impress in the 
nobler, more virile, more restrained poetry of his later 
life. 

Harold^ Becket, and Queen Mary are studies of great 
crises in the history of the English race. Their inter- 
est is not merely individual, it is also national. In 
each the conflicting forces of English national life are 
represented in the persons of prominent men and 
women, outstanding historical figures of the time. 
The tragedy in each life is a scene in the great 
drama of the development of England. The tragedy 
of Saxon Harold, dead at the feet of Norman William, 
marked a crisis which seemed to bode for England a 
bitter future, but it proved the beginning of her great- 
ness. In the tragedy of Becket, the struggle of the 
Church, the champion of the people's rights against 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. II3 

the Crown, is represented in the person of that great 
churchman and of his king. Once more, what seemed 
ominous for the future was proved by the future the 
opening-day of English freedom. In Queen Mary the 
issue involves both the spiritual and temporal life of 
England. Shall the nation guide its own destinies, 
take its own counsel in matters ecclesiastical, as in 
civil, or do homage to a foreign power and accept the 
decrees of Rome ? Here, again, the cause of liberty 
rises triumphant from its own ashes, and the darkest 
hour is seen to be only the hour before the dawn. 
Throughout these dramas the idea of a Providence 
in history is the ruling idea in Tennyson's mind, a 
Providence that shapes the nation's ends, let kings 
and statesmen rough-hew them how they will. 

Harold wdiS dedicated to Lord Lytton, the son of the 
Lord Lytton who had attacked Tennyson in the satire 
of The JVew Tif?io?i, and to whom Tennyson had re- 
plied under the pseudonym of " Alcibiades" in the 
trenchant verses published in Punch. The old quarrel 
was thus healed, and in the introductory sonnet to 
Harold the hate-healing influences of time are glanced 
at, and the blossoming of unexpected good out of the 
heart of conflict and of evil. 

There is much in Harold, as there is much in Queen 
Mary, to praise ; the movement is more rapid, the 
action predominates over the dialogue and the ana- 
lysis of emotions to a greater degree than in the earlier 
play ; but no such interest as attaches to the person of 
Mary is present in it, and thus Harold falls shorter of 
success. There is little reason to believe that if re- 
presented on the stage this play could long hold a 
place among English dramas whose reappearance is 
always welcome. 



114 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

In Becket,^ as in Queen Mary, Tennyson, though he 
attains no dramatic success, creates striking characters 
in the persons of the stern Ecclesiastic and the unhappy 
Rosamond. Few readers can fail to be impressed 
by these powerful studies — studies of real insight and 
force. They redeem Tennyson's dramatic work and 
preserve our interest in it despite all the faults and 
weaknesses, which, regarding it as a whole, are too pal- 
pably betrayed. Harold cannot rank with either in 
poetical strength. The^ Falcon, produced at St. James' 
Theatre in December, 1879,! ^^ ^ light, unambitious, 
fanciful piece, in which the plot, borrowed from the 
story of Sir Federigo, told by Boccaccio in the ninth 
novel of the fifth day of the Decameron, gains nothing in 
the new dramatic setting. The humour of the Falcon 
is without point, and the element of romance in the orig- 
inal has melted away in the new version. In The Cup, 
produced at the Lyceum in January, i88i,| Tennyson 
was happier in subject, as well as treatment, and 
achieved a deserved and unequivocal success. The 
story, a short and tragic one, is derived from Plutarch's 
De Claris Mulieribus. The interest is centred in few 
characters, the action proceeds rapidly, and the catas- 
trophe is impressive and pathetic. In this brief drama 
the author approached very near the production of a 
play that might have held the stage. He seemed to be 
progressing in that knowledge of effects and that 
management of situations without which dramas may 
be written for the reader, but cannot hold the atten- 
tion of the spectator. But from unequivocal success 

* Produced at the Lyceum by Mr. Irving and Miss Ellen Terry 
in February, 1893. 

f By Messrs. Hare and Kendal. 

X With Miss Ellen Terry as Caniina. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. II5 

Tennyson passed to unequivocal failure once more. 
The Promise of May, produced at the Globe Theatre* 
in 1882, was the only prose work written by the re- 
presentative poet of his time. It was also his only 
dramatic work in which he touched upon a subject 
which in so many of his poems he had treated with an 
intensity of feeling and a delicacy of judgment un- 
surpassed by any other poet — the problem of the re- 
lation between Faith, the daughter of the Heart, and 
Science, the daughter of the Head. In his dramatic 
presentation of that problem in its social aspects Ten- 
nyson's judgment failed him. Whether intentional or 
not — and we know on the author's own authority that 
it was unintentionalf — the conclusion inevitably offers 
itself that out of agnosticism must proceed social ruin, 
that the loss of religion is the beginning of anarchy. 
The thesis, in itself perhaps legitimate, is enforced il- 
logically and through an offensive situation. The dra- 
matic instinct is absent from the play as a whole, and 
we need not wonder that critics, no less than people, 
felt that it was unworthy of its great author. 

It was a happy circumstance that in his last essay in 
drama Tennyson turned again to a world of old ro- 
mance. The Foresters, an English woodland piece, 
though slight in texture, possesses the true Tennyso- 
nian charm. The plot is that of one of the best-known 
midland tales, told in the spirited ballad, A Lytel 
Gcste of Robyn Hood. The atmosphere is the at- 
mosphere of As You Like It. There breathes through 
it the poet's love of England and English traditions 
and English folk, and in the forest walks there lurks 
no concealed problem of modern life. An idyllic 

* By Mrs. Bernard Beere. \ See biography above, p. 34. 



Il6 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

masque, it recalls to the senses the glad sights and 
sounds of natural country life, and mingles with them 
the dream-like enchantment of a legend that recounts 
a merry, roguish life lived long ago. In this romantic 
pastoral Tennyson's dramatic essays found a fitting 
and fortunate conclusion. 

There can be no more striking passage in the 
history of poetry than that which puts on record the 
fruitage of Tennyson's genius in old age. Few even 
among thoughtful critics conceived of his 
Ballads and dramatic period as other than a day of de- 
Other Poems, cline, filled with experiments in an uncon- 
1880. genial form by one who had already ex- 
hausted his best powers in the work that 
lay behind him. Nothing more was expected of 
Tennyson, the book seemed naturally and not un- 
worthily closed, nor was there need to await further 
development ere assigning to him his place among 
the poets of his race and country. Yet in the drama 
he had lost and found himself. Out of the heart of 
failure there blossomed a marvellous success, the 
more marvellous, perhaps, because unlooked for. The 
Ballads of 1880 had a vigour, a breadth, a movement 
surpassing any previous volume. The pulse of action, 
the spirit of true dramatic art, beat strongly in poems 
free at last from all traces of daintiness, of super- 
fine graces. The very music breathed a nobler air 
and moved to manlier measures. The Monologue, a 
form doubtless suggested by Browning's example, 
prevails, and is nowhere used even by Browning with 
greater ease or finer talent for rapid effects. In The 
Revenge* and in The Defence of Luckncnv we have 

* The closeness with which Tennyson followed his authority — 
Raleigh — in his account of the fight between the Revenge and a 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. II/ 

ballads comparable with any in English ; in Columbus 
a stirring force of passion and passion-matching lan- 
guage ; in the dialect poems, The Northern Cobbler and 
The Village Wife, a powerful realism; \x\ De Profundis 
a deep-reaching philosophy, for which it will be in 
vain to look in the poetry of twenty years previous. 
A full and grave maturity shines in the verse of 
Tennyson's closing years. 

The Ballads and Other Poems were inscribed to the 
poet's grandson, another Alfred Tennyson, then a 
year and a half old: 

" Crazy with laughter and babble and earth's new wine." 

In addition to the poems already mentioned, the 
volume contained The First Quarrel, Rizpah, Sir John 
Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, The Sisters, In the Children's 
Hospital, A Prefatory Sonnet, contributed to the first 
number of The Nineteenth Century, edited by Tenny- 
son's friend, Mr. Knowles ; Sonnets to W. H. Brook- 
field and to Victor Hugo, and a sonnet entitled Mon- 
tenegro; translations, The Battle of Brunanbuhr and 
Achilles over the Tre7ich, the lines To the Princess 
Frederica of Hanover, the lines for Sir John Frank- 
lin's cenotaph in Westminster, and the lines To Dante. 
The only other poem not mentioned above which was 
printed in this volume was The Voyage of Maeldune. 
Maildun is the hero of an ancient Celtic romance.* 

" navy of Spain " is only matched by that of Wolfe in his famous 
verses on The Burial of Sir fohn Moore. Much of Tennyson's 
ballad, save for the metrical arrangement, is almost word for 
word taken from Raleigh's pamphlet. See A Report of the Truth 
of the Fight about the Iks of Azores this last sommer, betwixt the' 
Revenge, one of her Majesty's shippes, and an Armada of the King 
of Spaine. (Reprinted by Edward Arber, 1S71.) 
* See Joyce's Ancient Celtic Romances. 



Il8 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

The story belongs to the group of tales of sea voy- 
ages of which Sf. Brendan is the best known. The 
marvels seen by Maildun and his men are only par- 
tially related in Tennyson's ballad, and the tone of the 
original is lost, but the fantastic imaginative splen- 
dour of the legend could hardly be hidden even in its 
modern dress. 

The Tiresias volume was dedicated to Robert 
Browning, and strikes the personal as its predominant 
note. In the dedication to Fitzgerald, the translator 

of Omar Khayyam, and in the epilogue 

Tiresias and which speaks of his death ; in the teaching 

Other Poems, of the Ancient Sage, where in the person of 

1885. ^j^g gggj. Tennyson sums the beliefs of his 

own life ; in the prefatory poem to his 
brother's volume of Sonnets, published after the 
author's death — in all these we may read the veteran 
poet's sense of an end not very far off : 

" Remembering all the golden hours. 
Now silent, and so many dead." 

While they retain the original Tennysonian sweetness 
of phrase, the poems in this book are fuller of interest, 
deeper of tone, chaster of expression than those of 
his youth. Tiresias is another piece of classic sculp- 
ture for the gallery in which Lucretius, Ulysses, and 
Tithonus had already place. Baliti and Balan, an un- 
expected addition to the Idylls, was written as an in- 
troduction to Merlin and Vivien. The Dead Prophet is 
a characteristic, indignant, passionate remonstrance 
against "the scandal and the cry" which in these 
latter days are wont to follow upon the biographer's 
revelations of the private life of public men. Here, 
there is little doubt, by the Dead Prophet is meant 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. II9 

Tennyson's old friend, Carlyle ; and the profanation of 
his name by curious, scandal-loving readers, no less 
than the opportunity given them by the biographer, 
is the subject of the poet's savagest scorn and invec- 
tive. 

To me The Ancient Sage is the poem of by far the 
greatest interest in this volume, for can we not say 
that we have here the authentic, outspoken expression 
of the poet's creed, the first and last word in his con- 
fession of faith ? I have already spoken of that creed 
as the creed of the higher emotions. I may say of the 
faith in his own words, that it is " a faith beyond the 
forms of faith." The spiritual energies of his nature 
flowed into no mould of traditional doctrine, but they 
were the inspiration of his solemn visions and pro- 
phetic hopes. In the Two Voices, the poem of his 
youth which most closely corresponds to this of his 
age, the same piroblems are presented, but presented 
in a clever, logical texture, whose threads are finely 
drawn, but whose conclusions leave us cold. In the 
later poem, more vigorous and more dramatic in con- 
ception, from out a life's experience, from out a poet's 
heart of fire springs the living word of an intense and 
secure conviction. If the future hold for men an in- 
crease of knowledge which may warrant an increase 
of hope, then, indeed, " they will look back on Tenny- 
son as no belated dreamer, but as a leader who, in the 
darkest hour of the world's thought, would not despair 
of the destiny of man. They will look back on him 
as Romans looked back on that unshaken Roman who 
purchased at its full price the field of Cannae, on 
which at that hour the victorious Hannibal lay en- 
camped with his Carthaginian host."* 

* F. W. H. Myers, Tennyson as Prophet. 



I20 A TENNYSON PRIMER, 

The results of Tennyson's studies in the drama may- 
be seen in his heightened power in dealing with such 
situations as those of The Wreck, The Flight, and that 
most tragic of any in Tennyson's poetry, or, indeed, 
possible, in Despair. The lines To Virgil are the ex- 
pression of a life-long affection for a poet with whom, 
perhaps, Tennyson had more in common than any 
other, while the lines entitled Frater Ave atque Vale 
convey to English readers something of the beauty 
and pathos with which Catullus clothes the emotion 
of a wistful regret. The Charge of the Heavy Brigade 
falls short of the earlier battle-piece, and is less stir- 
ring than the account from which it is taken ; but in 
Hands all Round, originally published in 1852, the 
patriotic ardour of England's most patriotic poet is 
bravely and nobly sung. The remaining poems pub- 
lished in this volume are the epitaphs on Gordon, 
Caxton, and Lord Stratford de Redclyffe, Freedom, 
To the Duke of Argyll, Helen s Tower (written at the 
request of his friend, Lord Dufferin), To H. R. H. 
Princess Beatrice, Early Spring, To-Morrow (an Irish 
tale in dialect). The Spinster s Sweet Arts, and the lines 
(subsequently) entitled Poets and their Bibliographies. 
In the last-mentioned verses Tennyson glances at the 
poetic methods of Virgil and of Horace, methods 
similar to his own in the ceaseless labour of the file, 
and resents, with some impatience, the attention of 
the critics. Doubtless that impatience was in no 
slight degree due to the parallelisms adduced by them 
from other writers to many of Tennyson's own 
thoughts and phrases, and to the implied suggestion 
that his assimilative powers were conspicuously greater 
than his inventive. Tennyson was indisputably a 
great borrower, but he borrowed as only genius bor- 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 121 

rows, and had he not repudiated with somewhat un- 
necessary heat and protestation the charge of pla- 
giarism, the critic might not have found so keen a 
deHght in pressing home the charge. 

The greater part of the 1886 volume was occupied 
by the text of the drama (partly prose), The Promise of 
May, and, with the exception of the poem which gave 
its name to the book, there was little of in- 
terest among the new verses. The Fleet 
and The Ode on the Opejilng of the Indian Locksiey 
and Colonial Exhibition may be passed with- ^^^^' ^^^*y 

out comment. The \zX.&r Locksiey Hall is in ^ ,„„„ ' 

■^ etc. 1886. 

part a philippic against the moral degrada- Demeter and 

tion, the moral infirmities of the age, a other Poems. 

subject to which the poet returned, but 1889. 

with a larger motif, in Vast?iess, published 

in Demeter and Other Poems in 1889. The 

seriousness of their outlook upon life, the intensity 

of their feeling, the sincerity and depth of these 

poems harmonises with the fuller music, the less 

daintily wrought manner of Tennyson's later and 

stronger style. The impeachment, passionate though 

it be, in the later Locksiey Hall, of the littleness of 

man, is full of stern justice — 

" However we brave it out, we men are a little breed." 

{3faud.) 

In Vastness the poet makes the pathetic comparison 
between the best and the worst in man, between his 
aspirations and his achievements, between the narrow, 
circumscribed boundaries of his little life and the in- 
finite ocean that stretches away on all sides of his 
island-spot of earth. Vain, paltry, and meaningless, 
the history of the human race dwarfed in the immen- 



122 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

sities of boundless times and spaces becomes no more 
than 

" a trouble of ants in the light of a million million of suns." 

Here as elsewhere in Tennyson's poetry the only 
refuge from permanent intellectual confusion is 
found in the conviction that the soul and God stand 
sure, that 

' the dead are not dead, but alive." 

If the human interest in the youthful poems of 
Tennyson was slight, the later are almost overcharged 
with emotion. Colour and melod}' and fragrance 
were exchanged for anxious questionings upon the 
deepest problems of life and death, and in some 
poems so intensely fraught were they with human 
feeling, that the passionate expression was almost 
painfully affecting. 

In Oii.<d Rod, a rustic study that belongs to the same 
class as The A^orthcrn Farmer, in Forlorn, Happy, The 
Ring and Romney' s Remorse, the passion of S3'mpathy 
with suffering hearts thrills in the verse till it touches 
the infinite of pathos, while in Merlin a7id The Gleam 
and Crossing the Bar even the flute-like sweetness of 
the youthful lyrics is surpassed, and the voice of the 
poet-seer reaches in these poems an accent of almost 
sacred impressiveness. 

In Demeter and Persephone we have a poem equal to 
anything that the author ever gave us, a poem that 
with Lucretius, Tithonus, and the other classic studies, 
will keep pace with the years, nor ever suffer wrong 
at the hands of time. 

Tennyson's last volume, a posthumous volume, was 
in the press at the time of his death, and was pub- 



A TENNYSON PRIMER, 12$ 

lislied but a few weeks later. Though it contained 

nothing to increase, it sustained to the full 

his reputation, and fitly closed the long and 

bright career. T//e Death of (Eiwne, dedi- The Death of 

Gated in a new and difficult verse- form to ^none, 

Dr. Towett, the Master of Balliol, is a con- ^ 

-' ' . Dream, and 

tinuation and conclusion of the CEnone of other Poems 

1832. The blank verse freely and admir- i892. 
ably handled in this poem, as in St. Tele- 
mac/ius and in Akhar s Dream, is the stronger, 
less opulent verse of his later life, learnt in his dra- 
matic period — less ornate but no less musical than 
that of the Morte d' Arthur and The Princess. 

St. Telctiiachns may be taken as a companion study 
to St. Simeon Stylites, the record of " a deed that woke 
the world," marking the contrast between the fruitful 
influences of a single good action and the barren vir- 
tues of a life of asceticism. In Akbar s Dream Ten- 
nyson touches yet again upon the old matters of the 
meaning and the issues of life, and pleads, as in The 
Ancient Sage, for a "faith beyond the forms of faith," 
a religion of charity and hope. The Hymn to the Sun, 
with which it closes, exhibits all the fine qualities of 
his poetic workmanship — 

" Once again thou flamest heavenward, once again we see thee rise. 
Every morning is thy birthday, gladdening human hearts and eyes. 
Every morning here we greet it, bowing lowly down before thee. 
Thee the Godlike, thee the changeless in thine ever-changing skies. 

" Shadow-maker, shadow-slayer, arrowing light from clime to clime, 
Hear thy myriad laureates hail thee monarch in their woodland 

rhyme. 
Warble-bird, and open-flower, and men below the dome of azure 
Kneel adoring Him the Timeless in the flame that measures 

Time !" 



124 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Of the remaining shorter poems in the book, The 
Dawn and The Making of Man return to the problem 
of the moral progress of the race, while in Faith, 
The Silent Voices, and God and the Universe we have the 
last words of the poet to his fellows and to his own 
soul on the threshold of the unknown future — 

" ' Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy human state. 
Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power which alone is 

great, 
Nor the myriad world, His shadow, nor the silent Opener of 

the Gate.' " 



CHAPTER VII. 

The death of Alfred Tennyson seemed almost in a 
sense to bring the history of English poetry to a close. 
He had outlived all the great poets whose inspiration 
was drawn from the quickening, dilating forces of the 
first quarter of the century ; he had long dominated 
without a rival the poetic realm in the succeeding 
and quieter epoch ; he had been for fifty years the 
acknowledged chief of the poet clan, so perfect a re- 
presentative of English thought, so closely identified 
with English ideals, as to be looked upon as the natu- 
ral voice of the nation's noblest spiritual and intellect- 
ual life. Tennyson resumed in himself as its highest 
type the civilization of the Victorian era. And sum- 
ming as he did in his own person and in his work 
the gains of the English race throughout its long and 
splendid history of a thousand years, he must stand 
for us, as he will assuredly stand for all the future, as 
the poetic heir of England's aristocratic, intellectual, 
and heroic traditions. No such inheritance remains 
for his successors. The new is the age of democracy, 
and its poets must quarry their marbles from the virgin 
rock ; Tennyson built with material that was already 
shaped, and lay ready to his hand. His inspiration 
came from the past ; upon the past the eye of his poetic 
imagination was fixed ; in the traditions of the old 
masters he exercised himself, and in their schools he 
learnt the secrets of his art. He was of the order of 
poets who sum up, who bring to an end, while his friend 



126 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

and contemporary, Browning, was of another order — a 
pioneer poet, an explorer of new lands, the first 
adventurer in untilled poetic territory. And for this 
reason, perhaps, it may be justly said that Tennyson 
belongs to the history of language rather than to the 
history of thought. He was a polished speaker; master 
of an exquisite style ; he was not a natural orator, 
whose words spring forth to wing the impassioned 
message of the heart. Consider the contemporaries 
of his youth and of his age, Wordsworth and Browning. 
Here were poets, charged, it would seem, with oracles 
for men, but poets the burden of whose message lay 
heavy upon them, often indeed out-weighted or out- 
ran their immediate power of utterance. Wordsworth 
not infrequently found verse unsustainable, and 
Browning stammered in his haste to speak. But when 
from either source the word came to be spoken, it was 
abundantly evident that the revealing prophet was at 
our doors. Tennyson's revelation, as far as there was 
a revelation, was personal, the revelation of his own 
heart. Its sorrows and joys and hopes and aspira- 
tions — these were the real themes of his verse ; and be- 
cause these sorrows and joys and hopes and aspira- 
tions were also ours, their perfect expression was a 
wonder and a delight to us. Here were Carmina, verses 
that might be crooned as "charms" over a heart- 
dissolving grief to ease its pain, or lilted when lan- 
guage ran to music for very gladness of spirit, or re- 
called to characterize with magical fitness some natu- 
ral scene, or to sum in telling phrase a daily experience 
of every human life. " I sing myself," he might have 
said with truth, " and in these transcripts of my heart 
and mind you will find your own." 

I have said that in the poetry of Tennyson the past 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 12/ 

of English tradition is resumed ; in it the voice of the 
poet's own time is also heard, for he was, through half 
a century, the spokesman, the chief speaker of the 
English race. If in his early volumes, like Keats, he 
cared only for beauty and languorous melody, cared 
only for art as art, for poetry as a source of exquisite 
sensation, when the genius of the world had taken 
away the veil from his eyes and he saw life plain, his 
verse took wider range and graver accent. But while he 
came to represent the thought of his day, and was in a 
measure too a prophet of the things that were to be, 
disclosing the tendencies that ripen in due course into 
creeds, Tennyson never outstepped the intellectual 
and ethical traditions of his age and country. The 
English gentleman and scholar are not far off even in 
poems that breathe revolt, like Aland, or like the later 
Locksley Hall " curse the social forms " that delay the 
day of freedom and of truth. When Science, embol- 
dened by her successes, threatened the gates of the time- 
honoured citadel of faith, he declined any longer to 
hymn her praise ; when the dreams of the enthusiast 
for a new heaven and a new earth seemed about to 
take shape in revolution, he spoke of law, of freedom 
that slowly broadens down, and of the red fool-fury of 
the Seine. Tennyson kept with the main body of Eng- 
lish opinion, and was its champion. Thus only in a 
minor sense was he a shaping or compelling power in 
social or intellectual development, in the enfranchise- 
ment of mind. We may speak more truly of him as 
a poetic chronicler of the mental life of his time. 

A chronicler of the mental life of his time, this we 
must call him, but we must add, a chronicler who was 
a consummate artist. And success in poetry of this 
kind, though far indeed from success in the highest 



128 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

kind, is neither easy nor the product of every genera- 
tion. To chronicle the best ideas of any generation, 
it is necessary that one should feel inspired by them ; 
that one should find them a source of real power ; that 
one should estimate them as of the first importance, 
and even find pleasure in them. Hut this is not pos- 
sible for all men ; it is rarely possible for the poet whose 
penetrativeness, moral sagacity, and far, sure gaze dis- 
close to him the true meanings and real issues of 
things. Such poets, often in advance of their genera- 
tion, are more likely, save at epochs of rare insmra- 
tion, to find the times out of joint, the predominant 
current of ideas uninspiring, and the world into which 
they have been born an unwceded garden that runs to 
seed. The poetical spirit is an exacting spirit. A sym- 
pathetic spirit, you will say. Yes, sympathetic, but 
exacting. The needs of Tennyson's nature were such 
that he found his age satisfying ; its attitude of mind 
was his own attitude ; and thus it was that, as the 
chronicler of its mental life, he gained acceptance. 
Like Pope, he found the tersest expression for the 
dominant moods, the ruling ideas of his time, and be- 
came the historian of contemporary thought. Tenny- 
son, like Pope, took the surest path to immortality ;and 
when it is said that he belongs to the history of 
language rather than to the history of thought, it is 
meant that, thoughtful as he was, and passionate with 
the warm human passions of a poet, neither did he 
present in his work the full features of the age in 
which he lived, nor had he for that age a message of 
moment. Like his age, he was himself in doubt about 
many things, and had no unifying conception, no 
harmonising hypt^thesis to offer. On the minds of his 
own contemporaries Tennyson exerted no intellectual 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 1 29 

pressure, such as Carlyle exerted, nor did he awaken 
dulled or sleeping chords in the spiritual life by 
such strong, animating music as Browning's. His of- 
fice was to minister to the general mass of readers 
by holding up the mirror in which their most inti- 
mate thoughts and feelings were reflected with charm- 
ing simplicity, with marvellous exactness. 

Tennyson, then, was the spokesman of the English 
race in an era of art-renaissance, and he that runs 
may read the cardinal notes of his art — its assimila- 
tive power and the ciira et diligentia, the unwearied de- 
votion he gave to it. Of that assimilative faculty which 
made his verse so full-flavoured with reminiscences, so 
dear to scholars, so pleasant on the ears of those fa- 
miliar with the poetry of an elder day, more needs not 
to be written. Not a little of what has been written 
barely conceals the smile of irony beneath the veil of 
praise. So much that was beautiful, so little that was 
new! And indeed many of Tennyson's poems are a 
veritable ccnto^ a patchwork from Greek and Italian 
looms. Is it a cause for censure, you will ask, or 
must we find in these reminiscences an unqualified 
delight? To me, and I think I need make no de- 
fence of myself, the power possessed by Tennyson of 
reproducing in his verse the music of strains long 
familiar, of recalling in phrase and echo the best 
beauties of poets of long ago — to me this power 
seems an altogether admirable and delightful power. 
I cannot wish away a line of his poetry that displays 
it. To quarrel with Lucretius because it is built of 
materials taken from the Dc Kcruiii Natura, with pas- 
sages like that fine one descriptive of 

" The gods who haunt 
The lucid interspace of v urld and world" — 



130 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

to quarrel with such a phrase as that used by Cleopa- 
tra in The Dream of Fair Women — " I died a queen" — 
because it is a paraphrase of a fine expression used by 

Horace of Cleopatra, 

" invidens 
Privata deduci superbo 
Non humilis mulier triumpho," 

or with the stanza in which Helen of Troy, in the same 
poem, cries : 

" I would the white cold heavy-plunging foam, 
Whirl'd by the wind, had roll'd me deep below, 
Then when I left my home," 

because if we turn to the sixth Iliad w it shall find the 
original — to quarrel with such a line as " This way and 
that dividing the swift mind," because it is a transla- 
tion of Virgil's "Atque animum nunc hue celerem, nunc 
dividit illuc " — to make a quarrel upon causes like 
these would be to exhibit a temper unworthy of one 
bidden to the feasts of the gods. Tennyson is indeed 
full of translations and reminiscences ; he was a pla- 
giarist, as Virgil and Spenser and Milton and Shelley 
were plagiarists, but a plagiarist of less assurance. 
If I have a touch of disquietude in the matter, 
it is due to this lack of assurance in him. A frank 
expression of indebtedness to his peers of former 
time could have detracted nothing from his fame. 
His plagiarisms, if we must call them so, are likely 
to trouble us less than his anxiety to disprove 
them. It might well be replied to a critic who com- 
plained of these plagiarisms, that the hints taken by 
Tennyson were not hints given to him alone ; it might 
be replied that it is too late for criticism to complain 
of a poetical method honoured in the practice of the 



A TENNYSON I'KIMEK. I3I 

best poets of the ancient as of the modern world ; a 
poetical method which gave us Lycidas and Adonais 
and many another lovely poem beside, recalling words 
sweet on the ears of men long centuries ago, fra- 
grant with the infinite associations and memories that 
cling around the speech of Homer and Theocritus, of 
Horace and Virgil and Catullus. If Tennyson failed 
to be always powerful, he seldom failed to be in- 
teresting. And he seldom failed to be interesting 
because of his close acquaintance with the best writ- 
ings of the ancients as well as of the moderns, with the 
masterpieces of Greek art, with the wisest sayings of 
the philosophers — in a word, with the culture of the 
world. Tennyson seldom fails to be interesting be- 
cause of this close acquaintanceship with " the best 
that has been known and thought in the world," and 
because his poetry abundantly displays it. 

No less conspicuous in his verse than its wealth of 
reminiscences is the labor /ii/iw, the care he devoted to 
it. The marks of an unwearying labour of love are 
plainly visible in almost every line of his poetry, 
whether of his youth or age. Are you curious to learn 
the secrets of the poetical art ? There is no poet who 
goes so near betraying them. There is no poet who 
has so frequently shown a poem upon the stocks, in 
process of building. In the many versions of a poem 
like The Princess, you are admitted to the studio ; 
you are shown the first rough draft, the elaborated 
sketch, the completed picture. The instinct and 
care for form somewhat obscured in the work of his 
predecessors — this instinct and care for form, which in 
the early years of the century had suffered temporary 
eclipse, were early apparent in Tennyson's poetry. 
The favouring gale of inspiration and the proud full 



132 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

sail of Scott's and Byron's verse had seemed sufficient 
to their generation, had in the eyes of their readers 
left nothing to be desired. The rights of form were 
reasserted in the poetry of Coleridge and of Keats, 
and the earliest essays of Tennyson in verse foretold 
the character of his art, whose final aim was only 
reached in a laboured perfection of finish. Passing by 
the boyish verses of 1827, indicative of little more than 
the presence of strong poetical ambition, the poems of 
1832, though still without any grasp of realit}^ proved 
the advent of a writer with undoubted skill in words, 
with music in his brain. The feminine daintiness, the 
absence of all intensity, of the masculine voice, was 
the least hopeful sign of his early work, and seemed 
to indicate little real power behind the picture-music, 
behind the delicate web of words little real breadth of 
poetic imagination. 

Even his admirers in those early days would have 
welcomed verses that betrayed less anxious correct- 
ness, less highly wrought beauty of diction. The 
results appeared due to assiduous culture rather than 
to native strength, and it seemed more than doubtful 
that the ground could produce a richer or fuller crop. 
And indeed in Tennyson there is no such spontaneity as 
amazes us in Keats, there is no such " sweet slipping 
movement " as in Spenser. In his more ornate and 
decorative verse the artist is too conspicuous ; we ad- 
mire the skill of the workman more than the quality 
of the work. But let this be as it may, the admirable 
poise of his faculties remains to him. Tennyson's na- 
ture was finely balanced, and he rises far above the 
poets whose emotion is merely musical. In the firm 
balance of his nature, strong as his artistic instincts 
were, in the firm balance of his nature the artist rare- 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 133 

ly outran the man. The subordination of the matter 
to the form is less and less apparent in the succeeding 
volumes of his poetry. How different is he in this 
from the poets of to-day ! The latter-day poets as- 
sure us, and the latter-day critics likewise, that art is 
all in all, that poetry is style. We have critics not a 
few who regard sweetness and strength as attributes of 
style, and are ignorant that they are not attributes of 
style, but attributes of mind and character, expressed 
in style. How fortunate that in Tennyson the balance 
was preserved — the balance between the emotions and 
the will, between the heart and head, between what is 
said and the manner of saying it ! Because Tenny^ 
son's style is the expression of character, and not a 
palace of emptiness, because he is throughout sane 
and everywhere guided by a wise knowledge of the 
poet's craft, he is a true and great artist. To compare 
him with his successors is to gauge the true measure 
of his performance. With his successors the balance 
is lost, and when a man or a poet has nothing to say, 
to think that it can be said finely, what hallucination ! 
To think that the accent of freshness can be obtained 
by torturing language, that the great effects in 
poetry, the effects of Sophocles, of Dante and of 
Shakespere, their intense significance, can be account- 
ed for by a skill in words, an artisan's dexterity ! The 
great effects in poetry are straightforward effects ; the 
great effects of poetry are those in which the emphasis 
of expression corresponds to some emphasis of 
thought, some intensity of feeling. And it is because 
in Tennyson the artist rarely outran the man that we 
have confidence in him. If you ask me for the se- 
cret of Tennyson's hold upon the mind of his gener- 
ation, I shall answer you with assurance that it lies in 



134 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

his accent of sincerity, it lies in his literary integrity, 
in a wholesomeness in his art. For this integrity we 
value him, and for this the future will value him. 
The poetry that cannot make for beauty and grace and 
harmony in human life, since it has practically no bear- 
ing upon life at all, such poetry is as vain a thing as the 
jargon of the critics who commend it, and as transi- 
tory. 

As the poetic artist of the nineteenth century 
who best knew his own limitations, and in whom the 
balance, the compromise between form and matter in 
which poetry consists, is best preserved, as poetic 
chronicler of the mental life of his time, and as the 
interpreter of that spirit of intellectual hesitation 
which was characteristic of his contemporaries and 
leads to eclecticism in matters of faith, Tennyson will 
be remembered. And he will be remembered, although 
the greatness of his work must be looked for else- 
where than in its scope or imaginative power. The 
large comprehensiveness, the wide-eyed vision that 
takes in the spectacle of human life in its vast whole 
^nd in the complexity of its parts, this did not belong 
to him, nor did he share in all the joys and sorrows 
of mankind. Tennyson's lyrics sing the joys and 
sorrows of English folk ; he was above and before all 
the poet of England, the best lover among her poet- 
sons. For the rest his attitude was retrospective, and 
when his fancy ranged, the land of its dearest romance 
lay in the heroic past. " It was written," he said of 
that exquisite lyric, Tears, idle Tears, " at Tintern 
Abbey, when the woods were all yellowing with 
autumn, seen through the ruined windows. It is 
what I have always felt as a boy, and what as a boy I 
called the passion of the past. And it is always with 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. I35 

me now ; it is the distance that charms me in the 
landscape, the picture and the past, and not the im- 
mediate to-day in which I move."* 

To the colour-school of English poetry, to. the line- 
age of the poets of romance, Tennyson belonged. He 
did not care to draw in outline, to impress by the 
naked grandeur of conception. From the first, like 
Keats, he held that poetry should surprise by a fine 
excess, by a richness and profusion of beauties, that 
it should be a veritable cloth of gold. From the first 
he was for such accessories as should lead the senses 
captive and enthrall the reader with infinite vistas of 
delight. Yet his is not the bewildering charm of 
Spenser's fairyland, the luxuriant undergrowth of 
beauty in enchanted forests. Rather it is the ordered 
beauty of a noble English garden, of the English 
landscape that he loved so well. It was said by 
Wordsworth of Tennyson : " He is not much in sym- 
pathy with what I should myself most value in my at- 
tempts — viz., the spirituality with which I have en- 
deavoured to view the material universe, and the moral 
relations under which I have wished to exhibit its 
most ordinary appearances." It is true that Tenny- 
son was not much in sympathy with such attempts. 
Few poets indeed have kept with Nature a closer com- 
panionship ; her sights and sounds were his most 
familiar friends. To this close companionship we owe 
the skilful appropriateness of his backgrounds and 
the delicate accuracy of their form and colour. Tenny- 
son observed, and observed narrowly ; observed indeed 
with something akin to the trained scientific eye. 
There is no need to adduce from his poetry passages 

* Cf. The Ancient Sage — " On me, when boy, there came what 
then I call'd," etc. 



136 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

to prove how loving and how close an eye he kept 
upon the world around him. Readers of Tennyson do 
not need to be reminded of such touches as meet us, 
for example, in a phrase like that descriptive of the 
yew tree answering a random stroke, 

" With fruitful cloud and living smoke" — 

such illustrative touches as meet us here, 

" Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love, 
Delaying as the tender ash delays 
To clothe herself when all the woods are green." 

Those who are acquainted with the poetry of 
Tennyson know that it is a mine of such wealth ; they 
know that he was a true lover of Nature, of her trees 
and flowers and waters, and her skies and silent stars. 
They know too that he was a bird lover, and that 
there are few English birds that have not found men- 
tion in his verse. But for all this Wordsworth was 
right. Tennyson did not, in the same degree as 
Wordsworth, "see into the life of things," and when 
the elder poet's imagination would have kindled into 
.the flame of unquenchable poesy, Tennyson remained a 
draughtsman and a colourist, but the draughtsman 
and colourist who is perhaps the greatest of English 
idyllic poets. His admirers have much to tell us of 
his greatness as an epic, of his greatness as a dra- 
matic poet. It will be sufficient for us to maintain 
an attitude of admiration, but an attitude of admira- 
tion qualified by some acquaintance with the great 
epics and the great dramas of the world. The truth 
is, that Tennyson's versatility is a source of critical 
error, just as Byron's brilliancy and versatility were a 
source of rrJtl^al prror. Possessed of a finer judg- 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 137 

ment but a narrower imaginative range and less 
strength than Byron, Tennyson essayed, like Byron, 
song and idyl, epic and drama. Tennyson essayed 
all these, and on the whole essayed them more success- 
fully than Byron. But as it is merely idle to speak of 
Byron as a great dramatic or even a great epic poet, 
it is idle to speak of Tennyson as having achieved 
greatness in these, the highest departments of the poetic 
art. The creative artists are few, and though Tenny- 
son was not one of them, though his real power lay 
in the adornment of familiar themes, in the re-cloth- 
ing of familiar feelings, so strong and brilliant a 
writer, so careful and so fine an artist could hardly 
fail of success, even in fields unsuited to his genius. 
By reason of his versatility, Tennyson is a difficult 
poet to characterize. But however his critics may dif- 
fer upon other points, they will be at one upon this, that 
his idyllic poems possess a singular and vivid charm, 
and they will be at one upon this also, that in great 
measure they possess this charm because in no other 
poems have the features of English landscape found so 
admiring and so faithful an interpreter. Here is a 
poet in whose dealings with Nature there is no mysti- 
cism, who sees in her only what all may see, and yet 
for whom Nature, as seen by the scientific eye, has 
suffered no loss of beauty, no diminution of her poetic 
stimulus. For many poets Nature has been the dwell- 
ing-place of innumerable spirits, passionful creatures 
of the flood and field, spirits of forest and stream, lush 
meadow and gray hill-side. These half-human, half- 
divine shapes flitted by them in the music of the wind, 
babbled in the rivulet, or held revel in the cool green 
depths of their long sea-halls. Upon the minds of 
their less imaginative readers the appeal made by the 



138 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

fantastic dreams of such poets was necessarily slight. 
The nature-poetry of Wordsworth required for its due 
appreciation even a more active and certainly a more 
spiritual imagination. In Tennyson's world the de- 
mand for any activity of imagination on the part of 
the reader is unapparent ; his pictures satisfy the 
senses and fill the eye. Mark the sharpness of out- 
line, the lucidity and completeness of this, the descrip- 
tion of the island in Enoch Arden : 

" The mountain wooded to the peak, the hiwns 
And winding glades, high up like ways to Heaven, 
The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes, 
The lightning flash of insect and of bird, 
The lustre of the long convolvuluses 
That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran 
Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows 
And glories of the broad bell of the world ; 
All these he saw ; but what he fain had seen 
He could not see, the kindly human face, 
Nor ever heard a kindly voice, but heard 
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl. 
The league-long roller thundering on the reef, — 
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd 
And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep 
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave. 
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long 
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, 
A shipwreck'd sailor waiting for a sail : 
No sail from day to day, but every day 
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts 
Among the palms and ferns and precipices ; 
The blaze upon the waters to the east ; 
The blaze upon his island overhead ; 
The blaze upon the waters to the west ; 
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, 
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again 
The scarlet shafts of sunrise, but no sail." 



A TENNVSON PRIMER. 1 39 

In the poetry of Tennyson Nature is suffused in a 
mellow light ; she is at peace, charged with a message 
of rich but quiet beauty. He sought her society for 
soothing influences, for her infinite lore and her celes- 
tial calm, not, as did Wordsworth, to find a presence 
that disturbed him with the joy of elevated thoughts. 

But just as the reader of Wordsworth will feel the 
absence of spirituality in Tennyson's transcripts of na- 
ture, the readers of Browning will miss in him the 
spiritual fire by which that poet discovers in nature 
and life and art not the powers that make for rest and 
peace, but for restless and upward strife ; they will 
miss in him the spiritual energy which finds the best 
hopes of the race in the thought 

" that man is hurled 
From change to change unceasingly, 
His soul's wings never furled." 

For Tennyson not passion, not aspirations and en- 
thusiasms are man's guiding angels, but love and duty 
and allegiance ; and while he seeks for quiet waters 
and for harbours of refuge for the soul upon the voy- 
age of life. Browning " is glad to know the brine salt 
on his lips and the large air again," and finds invigo- 
rating influences and infinite encouragement in the 
midst of toil and storm ; quoedam divina volaptas, a cer- 
tain divine gladness in the wind and reeling seas. 

You will seek in vain in Tennyson for the larger 
elements, the far horizons of thought, the wide and 
gracious spaces, the unimagined depths, the austere 
yet tranquillising sadness, the severe unbroken calm, 
the magnanimities of the greatest poetry. You will 
seek in vain for the presence of the higher imagina- 
tion. The popular verdict will not have it so. It will 



I40 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

affirm that none of the qualities of the highest poetry 
are absent from Tennyson's verse. But for those 
acquainted, however slightly, with the literature of 
the world's past, passage after passage will rise to 
mind, passage after passage beside which there is 
nothing of Tennyson's to be placed. Take one from 
a contemporar)' : 

" The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth, 
And the earth changes like a human face ; 
The molten ore bursts up among the rocks, 
Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright 
In hidden mines, spots barren river-beds. 
Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask — 
God joj'S therein. The wroth sea's waves are edged 
With foam, white as the bitter lip of hate, ■ 
When, in the solitary waste, strange groups 
Of j'oung volcanos come up, cyclops-like. 
Staring together with their eyes on flame — 
God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride. 
Then all is still ; earth is a wintry clod : 
But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes 
Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure 
Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between 
The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost, 
Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face ; 
The grass grows bright, the boughs are swollen with blooms 
Like chrysalids impatient for the air. 
The shining dorrs are bus\', beetles run 
Along the furrows, ants make their ado ; 
Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark 
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy ; 
Afar the ocean sleeps ; white fishing gulls 
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe 
Of nested limpets ; savage creatures seek 
Their loves in wood and plain — and Gud renews 
His ancient rapture." 

I have elsewhere said that Browning was our only 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 14I 

representative of Christian art in an era of classical 
revival. And he was so because his interest centred 
in the individual rather than in any terrestrial future of 
the race, and because in the pursuit of his art, his reach 
exceeded his grasp, his thought outsped his expres- 
sion. He passed by, and that deliberately, the possi- 
bility of perfection in a limited sphere of endeavour, 
preferring to follow forever the supreme unapproach- 
able ideal. In Browning's poetry the splendid eleva- 
tions alternate with the levels of indisputable prose. It 
was not so with Tennyson. Where inspiration failed, 
the labour of the artist was redoubled and the verse 
showed no signs of weakness. Tennyson, to use his 
own phrase, " respected the limitations," wrought 
with no material save such as he could fashion to per- 
fection, grasped and outlined his thought with the 
sharp precision of one who speaks of familiar experi- 
ences, and was master of all the keys of his instru- 
ment. Tennyson clove the mark at which he aimed, 
but Browning's arrow, like that of the archer of 
ancient story, sped, in an arc of light, beyond the 
ken of the gazers, to be lost in the overarching 
heaven. 

When the critic has put on record his judgments, 
but one part of his duty is performed. He must put 
on record his admiration also. And if the office of 
the poet were to be a minister of sweet pleasure only, 
I do not know that Tennyson might not be rightly 
judged the first of the moderns. There is no body of 
English verse wherein for eye and ear and heart a 
feast of purer, more unalloyed pleasure is spread. 
And Tennyson's reward was the reward of accept- 
ance. By the choice of his subjects as well as by the 
variety of his form, by the simplicity and directness 



142 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

of his method and by the tempered perfection of his 
art he made his irresistible appeal to his countrymen. 
Even in his rendering of an old-world story, in his 
treatment of a Greek myth, he satisfied the modern 
ear, he created the atmosphere that was the poetic 
breath of life to the sensitive minds of the time. In 
his lyrics, where he was most original, he made an 
almost untouched field of human feeling his own, the 
field of that vague, wordless autumnal sadness of the 
spirit, a sadness that seems to have its source in a 
secret sympathy with some hidden sorrow lying deep 
in the heart of Nature, the universal mother. Tenny- 
son was born for acceptance as a poet ; under his 
transmuting touch all material became poetic. He 
was born for acceptance, and in his strong practical 
cjualities, in his deep-rooted love for the heroic, as 
displayed in his stirring ballads of action, in his tender 
domesticities, as well as in his uiupicnchable patriot- 
ism and love of political order, he was a poet after 
the English heart. He may well spare to others the 
crowns of their deserving, the people's garland of 
affection will long be Tennyson's. 

That from first to last in Tennyson's poetry the 
idea of law is paramount, that the central doctrine of 
his political and social creed was the dt)ctrine of an 
equable progress under the reign of law — all this has 
been sufficiently dwelt on by the critics. His philo- 
sophy, too, has been sufliciently dwelt on, his ethical 
and religious teaching. One word more may be 
added. Of his creed, the creed of optimism, it is 
inevitable that the inquiry be made. Of what valid- 
ity is such a creed, reached by a process unknown to 
logic, supported only by frail trembling desires and 
emotions that know not the place of their birth? 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 1 43 

What is the poet that we should trust him, and who 
shall be our prophet but the man of science, the revealer 
of the indisputable fact? There is but one answer 
to these questions : We are not optimists by nature, 
neither are we pessimists. To the cry of despair in 
the poetry of the world, ofttimes an exceeding 
bitter cry, the heart of man responds no less than to 
its cry of hope — 

" Surgit amari aliquid, quod in ipsis floribus angat." 

To the cry of despair in the poetry of the world, let 
it be fully granted, the heart, indeed, responds, but 
from the beginning of things one thought has never 
found but momentary place in the human mind, one 
thought has seemed to all men intolerable — that the 
base and selfish and unjust and craven-hearted have 
read the riddle of life aright ; that the battle has been 
and will be to these, and that its pure and merciful 
and brave and generous souls are the foolish and the 
vanquished ones of earth. This, even in the foolish- 
ness that is our only wisdom, we cannot think. And 
at the foundations of all poetry and philosophy to 
which we are accustomed to look for the awakening 
and the nourishment of the best and highest in man, 
at the foundations of all poetry and philosophy we find 
that they arc built upon this rock of faith. We shall 
do well to be on the side of Plato, and of the house- 
hold of the poets. 



LIST OF DATES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY, 

iSog. Alfred, the third son of the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, 
LL.D., and Elizabeth Fytche, was born at Somersby 
Rectory, in Somersby, Lincolnshire. The family consisted 
of seven sons (Frederick and Charles preceding Alfred) 
and five daughters. 

1811. Arthur Hallam born. 

18 16. Alfred entered the Grammar School at Louth. 

1820. Alfred left the Grammar School at the Christmas vacation. 

1826. Poems by Two Brothers. " Hcec nos novimtis esse nihil" 

(Martial). London : Printed for W. Simpkin & R. Mar- 
shall, Stationers, Hall Court, and J. & J. Jackson, Louth, 
MDCCCXXVIL, (post-dated), pp. xii., 228. Published in 
two sizes, 8vo and i2mo. 

1827. Notice of Poems by Two Brothers, in the Literary Chronicle 

and Weekly Review (May 19). 

1828. Alfred and Charles Tennyson went up to Trinity College, 

Cambridge, whither Frederick had preceded them. 

1829. TiMBucTOO : A poem which obtained the Chancellor's medal 

at the Cambridge Commencement. By A. Tennyson, of 
Trinity College, MDCCCXXIX. Printed in the Cam- 
bridge Chro7iicle of July 10, 1829, and in the ''Prohisiones 
AcademiccE prt^mis annuis dignatis et iit curia Canta- 
brigiensi recitata; comitiis maximis. A, D. MDCCCXXIX. 
Cantabrigics ; typis academicis excudit Joannes Smith, 
pp. 13." Reprinted several times in collections of " Cam- 
bridge Prize Poems." 

Notice of Ti/nbuctoo in The AthencBum (July 22). 

Burlesqued by W. M. Thackeray in The Snob (Cambridge), 
pp. 18-21. 

Reviewed in The Athcnceum (July 22). 

1830. Poems, chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred Tennyson. London : 

Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, Cornhill, 1830, 8vo, 
pp. 154, and leaf of errata. (No Table of Contents.) 



146 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam made an excursion 
into the Pyrenees. 

In this year Charles Tennyson published S<y/n/<-/s and Fugi- 
tive Pieces. 
1S31. No More. -\ Printed in llie Gem, a Literary An- 

Anacreontics. > nual. London : W. Marshall, i Holborn 

A Fragment. 3 Bars, MDCCCXXXI. 

Sonnet, " Check every outflash, every ruder sally." Printed 
in The Eiiglis/inian's Magazine {Awgnsl). Reprinted, 1833, 
in Friendship' s Offering, p. 29. 

Review of Poems, chiefly Lyrical, in The Westminster Re- 
vieii) (January) ; in The Tatler (February 24 and succeed- 
ing numbers), by Leigh Hunt, and in The Englishman's 
Magazine (August), by A. H. Hallam {On Some of the 
Characteristics of Modern Poetry and on the Lyrical Poems 
of Alfred Tennyson). 

The Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, the poet's father, died, 
March 16, aged 52. 

1832. Poems, by Alfred Tennyson. London : Edward Moxon, 

64 New Bond Street, MDCCCXXXIIL, pp. 163, leaf of 
contents, title, and half title. Published in winter of 1S32 
and post-dated. 

Sonnet, " There are three things which fill my heart with 
sighs." Printed in the Yorkshire Literary Annual (ed- 
ited by C. F. Edgar). London : Longmans & Co., 
p. 127. 

Sonnet, "Me, my own fate to lasting sorrow doometh. " 
Printed in Friendship's Offering, a literary album. Lon- 
don : Smith, Elder & Co., p. 367. 

Review of Poems (1833) in Blackivood'' s Magazine (May), by 
Christopher North (Professor Wilson). Reprinted in 
works of Professor Wilson, vol. vi., pp. iog-152. 

Review of Poems (1S33) in Atheneeum (December l). 

Arthur Hallam graduated at Cambridge. A guest at Som- 
ersby. 

1833. The Lover's Tale, by Alfred Tennyson. London : Ed- 

ward Moxon, 64 New Bond Street, MDCCCXXXIIL, pp. 
60. (Suppressed and withdrawn from the press.) 
Review of Poems (1833) in The Quarterly (July), attributed 
to John Gibson Lockhart, the editor. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. I47 

Review of Poems, chiefly Lyrical, by W. J. Fox in The 

Alonthly Repository (January). 
Arthur Henry Hallam died at Vienna, September 15. 

1834. Mrs. Tennyson removed to Cheltenham, after three years 

at Boxley, near Maidstone. 

1835. Review of Tennyson s Poems in The London Revieiv, (after- 

wards merged in The Westtninster Review) (July), by John 
Stuart Mill. 
Tennyson visited Cumberland. 

1836. Charles Tennyson Turner married Louisa .Sellwood, sister 

of Emily, who became the wife of Alfred Tennyson. 

1837. St. Agnes. Printed in The Keepsake (edited by Lady E. S. 

Wortley). London : Longmans & Co. 

Stanzas, "Oh that 'twere possible." Printed in The 
Tribute : a Collection of Miscellaneous Unpublished 
Poems by Various Authors (edited by Lord Northamp- 
ton). London : John Murray, pp. 244-250. 

Notice of Tennyson in The Edinburgh Review (October). 

Tennyson family left Somersby for High Beech, Essex. 
1S38. Tennyson appears as a member of the Anonymous Club. 

1842. Poems, by Alfred Tennyson. In two volumes. London : 

Edward Moxon, Dover Street, MDCCCXLII., pp. vii., 
233, vii., 231. 

Review of 1842 /"tfc'wj in The Westminster Revie^u {Octoher), 
by Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton). 

Review in The Quarterly by John Sterling, vol. Ixx., pp. 
385-416. Reprinted in Sterling's Remains, vol. i., pp. 
422-462. 

Review in The Examiner (May). 

Review in Tail's Edinburgh Magazine (August). 

Review in The London University Magazine (December). 

Review in The Christian Examiner , Boston (November). 

Tennyson introduced to Carlyle. 

Cecilia Tennyson married to Edward Law Lushington (Oc- 
tober). 

1843. Poems, by Alfred Tennyson. 2 vols. 2d edition. Changes 

were introduced into The Blackbird, Walking to the 
Mail, The Day Dream, and The Two Voices. 
Bon Gaultier Ballads, by Theodore Martin and W. E. 
Aytoun, published in Tail's and Eraser s magazines. 



148 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

These contained parodies of several of Tennyson's 

poems. 
Review of Pooiis in Tlic Edin/nirgh Review (July). 
Elizabeth Barrett (Browning) introduced to Tennyson. 
Tennyson meets Wordsworth. 

1844. Portrait and notice of Tennyson in R. H. Home's A New 

Spirit of the Age. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 

Review of Tennyson in The Democratic Revieia (January), 
New York, by Mrs. Kemble. 

Marginalia, by Edgar Allan Poe, in the December num- 
ber of the same review, p. 580. 

1845. Poems, by Alfred Tennyson. 2 vols, 3d edition, A note 

to the Idyll of Dora and The Ballad of Lady Clare omitted. 
Review of Poems in Chambers' Edinburgh Reviezu (July), 
Tennyson's name was placed on the Civil List for a pension 

of ;i^2oo a year by Sir Robert Peel. 
Tennyson satirised as Poet and Pensioner in The New Ti- 
mon : A Romance of London, by Sir E, B. Lytton. Lon- 
don : Henry Colburn, 
Living Poets, and their Services to the Cause of Political 
Freedom and Human Progress. No. HL, Alfred Tennyson, 
Lectures addressed chiefly to the Working Classes, by 
W. J. Fox. Published from the reporter's notes, Lon- 
don, 1845, vol. i., pp. 248-265. 

1846. Poems, by Alfred Tennyson. 2 vols. The Golden Year 

first printed in this edition (the last in two volumes). 
The New Timon and the Poets. A reply to Bulwer Lytton, in 

Punch (February 28): 
Afterthought, in Punch (March 7). 

Keats and Tennyson. Conversations on the Poets, by J. R, 
/ Lowell, Cambridge, U, S,, p, 104, 

1847. The Princess : A Medley, by Alfred Tennyson. London: 

Edward Moxon, Dover Street, MDCCCXLVH., pp, 
164, 
Notice of Tennyson in William Howitt's Homes and Haunts 
of the Most Eminent British Poets. London, 1S47, vol. 
ii., pp. 452-470, 

1848. The Princess : A Medley, by Alfred Tennyson, 2d edi- 

tion. With a Dedication to Henry Lushington, This 
edition contains a few slight verbal alterations. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. I49 

Poems, by Alfred Tennyson. 5th edition, pp. viii., 372. 
The first one-volume edition. 

Review of The Princess in Quarterly Review (March), at- 
tributed to Sara Coleridge. 

Review of The Princess in The North British Review 
(May). 

Lines to , " You might have won the poet's fame," in 

The Examiner (March). 

The Living Authors of England (Tennyson, pp. 36-60), 
by T. Powell, New York. 

Review of Poems in Blackwood' s Magazine (April). 

Review of Poems in The Westmitister Reviezv (July). 

Review of The Princess in The Edinburgh Review (October). 

Review of 77/^? Princess in The New Englander, by Pro- 
fessor Hadley, of Yale. 

In Memoriam. London : Edward Moxon, pp. vii., 210. 
(Anonymous.) The 2d and 3d editions unaltered save 
by the correction of two misprints. 

The Princess. 3d edition. (Partly rewritten and much al- 
tered ; the songs added.) 

Poems. 6th edition, pp. 374. Addition of lines, " You 
might have won the poet's name." 

Lines, " Here often, when a child, I lay reclined." Printed 
in The Manchester A thcna:u7n Album. 

Alfred Tennyson married to Emily Sellwood, June 15, in 
Shiplake Church, Oxfordshire. Settled at Chapel House, 
Twickenham, after a journey to Italy. 

Alfred Tennyson appointed Poet Laureate, November 19, 
to succeed William Wordsworth, who died April 23. 

Tennyson, in Eraser' s Magazine (September), by Charles 
Kingsley. 

Review of In Memoriam in Tail's Edinburgh Magazine 
(August). 

Review of In Memoriam in Sharpe's London Magazine (Au- 
gust). 

Review of In Afemoriam in The Westminster Rcviciv (Oc- 
tober). 

Review of In Memoriam in Dublin University Magazine 
(August). 

The Princess. 4th edition, pp. 182. Passages added 



ISO A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

describing the Prince's ^vcird seizures, and the fourth song 
altered. 

In Memoriam. 4th edition. Sec. lix. added (" O Sorrow, 
wilt thou live with me?"). 

Poems. 7th edition. The following poems added, To the 
Queen J Edwin Morris, or tJie Lake; Come Not wlien I am 
Dead, and The Eagle. 

Stanzas, "What time I wasted youthful hours," and 
" Come not when I am dead." Printed in The Keepsake 

. (edited by Miss Power). London : David Bogue, p. 22. 

Sonnet to W. C. Macready, read by John Forster at the 
farewell dinner to the actor. Printed in The Household 
Narrative of Current Events (February, March), in The 
People's Jourtial {A^rW), and elsewhere. 

Review of In Memoriam in The People's and Howitt's Jour- 
nal (}J\.a.y). 

Five papers on Tennyson's Prineess in the Christian So- 
cialist (September to November), by Gerald Massey. 

Tennyson presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, 
March 6. 

1852. Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, by Al- 

fred Tennyson, Poet Laureate. London : Edward Mox- 

on, pp. 16. 
Stanzas, " Britons, guard your own," in The Examiner 

(January 31). 
Lines, " Third of February, 1852," and " Hands All Round," 

in The Examiner (February 7). 
(These three poems were over the signature of " Merlin.") 
A Second Gallery of Literary Portraits, Edinburgh, by 

George Gilfillan (Tennyson, pp. 148-159). 
Literary Recreations, by D. L. Richardson. (Criticism 

of the Day and Tennyson, pp. 291-305.) London : 

Thacker & Co. 
Hallam, Tennyson's eldest son (now Lord Tennyson), born 

at Twickenham (August). 

1853. Poems. 8th edition, pp. 379. Poem, Sea Fairies (1830 vol.) 

restored ; A Dream of Fair Women, and To the Queen 
altered ; To E. L., on his Travels in Greece, added. 
The Princess. 5th edition, pp. 183. Passage from the 
"gallant, glorious chronicle" added in the Prologue. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 151 

An Essay on the Characteristic Errors of ottr Most Dis- 
tinguished Livitig Poets, by Nicholas J. Gannon, Dublin, 
pp. 49. 

Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half Century, 
by D. M. Moir. Edinburgh and London : Blackwood 
& Sons. (Tennyson, pp. 307-317.) 

Translation : Gedichte iibersetzt von W. Hertzberg. Dessau. 

Bought, and went to reside at, Farringford, Freshwater, 
Isle of Wight. 

Tennyson visited the Western Highlands, Staffa and lona. 

1854. The Charge of the Light Brigade. First printed in 

The Examiner (December 9). A thousand copies on a 
quarto sheet (August, 1855), with a note by the author, 
printed for distribution among the soldiers before Sebas- 
topol. 

Days and Hours, by Frederick Tennyson. London : John 
W. Parker & Son, West Strand, pp. viii. , 346. 

Dedication by Frederick Denison Maurice of his Theological 
Essays to Tennyson. 

Lionel, Tennyson's second son, born at Farringford. 

Translation : In Menioriam aus dein Englischen. Braun- 
schweig. 

1855. Maud, and other Poems, by Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., 

Poet Laureate. London : Edward Moxon, pp. 154. 

R eview of The Poetry of Alfred Tennyson, by Gerald 
Massey, in Hogg's Instructor (July). 

Review of Maud in Blackwood's Magazine (September). 

Review of Maud in Dublin University Magazine (Septem- 
ber). 

Review of Maud in The Edinbttrgh Review (October). 

Review of Aland in Eraser's Magazine (September). 

Review of Aland in The A^ational Review (October). 

Review of Aland in The North American Review (October), 
by the Rev. E. E. Hale. 

Essay on Tennyson, by George Brimley, published in Cam- 
bridge Essays. Reprinted in Brimley's Collected Essays. 

The University of Oxford conferred the D.C.L. upon Ten- 
nyson at the May Commencements. 

1856. Maud, and other Poems. 2d edition, with considerable 

alteration and enlargement, pp. 164. 



152 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Alfred Tennyson : An Essay. In three parts. By W. 
Fulford in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, pp. 7, 

73. 136. 
English Traits, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Tennyson in 

LiUrahere article. Works. Vol. ii., pp. 114-115.) 
Teniiysons Maud Vindicated, The Spirit and Purpose of 

Maud, by R. J. Mann, M.D. London : Jarrold & Son, 

pp. 78. 
Anti-Maud, by a Poet of the People. 2d edition. London : 

L. Booth, pp. 30. 
Defence of Matid in an anonymous volume of poems, en- 
titled lonica, in verses entitled After Reading Maud, 

September, 1855. 
Review of Maud in the London University Magazine (May). 
Notice of Tennyson in The National Magazine (November). 

1857. Enid and Nimue ; or, The True and the False. Tw^o 

idylls privately printed (probably intended for publication 
and withdrawn for alterations), pp. 139. 

Notice of Tennyson in the London University Magazine 
(April). 

Lectures and Miscellanies, by H. W. Freeland, M.A. Lon- 
don : Longmans & Co. (Tennyson's In Memoriavi, pp. 
194-200.) 

Bayard Taylor visited Tennyson at Farringford (June). See 
Bayard Taylor's At Home and Abroad, p. 372. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne met Tennyson at the Manchester Ex- 
hibition (July). 

1858. Two stanzas on the marriage of the Princess Royal, added 

by Tennyson to the National Anthem, January 28, 1858. 
Printed in the newspapers of January 29. Notice of Ten- 
nyson by the Rev. F. W. Robertson in his Lectures and 
Addresses. London : Smith, Elder & Co., pp. 124-141. 

On June 22 Clough " heard Tennyson read a third Arthur 
poem — the detection of Guinevere, and the last interview 
with Arthur." {Remains of A. H. Clough, vol. i., p. 235.) 

Prince Albert visited Tennyson at Farringford. 

Tennyson visited Inverary as the guest of the Duke of 
Argyll. 
1S59. Idylls of the King, by Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet 
Laureate. London : Edward Moxon & Co., pp. 261. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. I 53 

Verses, The War (" There is a sound of thunder afar"). 
Printed in The Times (May 9), signed "T. " Acknowl- 
edged by Tennyson, iSgi. 

Verses, The Grandmother s Apology. With an illustration 
by J. E. Millais. Printed in Onee a Week (July 16). 
Now entitled The Grandmother . 

Tennyson and his Teachers, by Peter Bayne, M.A. James 
Hogg & Sons, Edinburgh and London, pp. 202-2S0. 

Review of Idylls of the A'iiig in The National Reznezv (Oc- 
tober), pp. 368-394. 

Review of Idylls of the King in Fraser's Magazine (Septem- 
ber). 

Review of Idylls of the King in Edinburgh Revieia (July). 

Rewlaw oi Idylls of the K'ing in the N^orth British Hevieto 
(August). 

Review of Idylls of the King in The New Riigbeian, by 
Warner Lee (September), pp. 267-271. 

Review of Idylls of the King in Blaektuood's Magazine (No- 
vember). 

Review of Idylls of the King in The Constitutional Press 
(September). 

Review of Te7tnyson's Poems in Tlie Quarterly (October), pp. 

454-485- 

Review of Tennyson in Meliora, a quarterly review of so- 
cial science (October). 

Article on The Polities of the Poet Laureate, by D. Owen 
Maddyn, in The Constitutional Press (June). 

Article on Moral Aspects of Mr. Tennyson's Idylls of the 
King, by J. M. Ludlow, Macmillans Magazine (No- 
vember). 

Notice of Tennyson's Maud in Macmi Han's Magazine 
(December), No. 2. 

Review of Tennyson s Poems, by John Nichol, in The 
Westminster Review (October). 

The Poetical Character, Illustrated from the Works of Al- 
fred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate, a lecture delivered 
at Sheffield, December 6, by the Rev. Alfred Gatty, 
M.A., Vicar of Ecclesfield. London : Bell & Daldy, 
1S60, pp. 29. 

Translation : De Molenaar s-dochter ; door A. J. de Bull. 



154 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Tennyson visited Portugal (Vigo, Lisbon, Cintra, and the 
Monastery of da Cortica) with Mr. F. T. Palgrave. (Ac- 
count by Mr. Palgrave in Undtr t.'u- Ciotvii, a magazine. 
Nos. I and 2.) 

Dean Stanley visited Tennyson at Farringford. 

Tennyson's bust, by Woolner, presented to Trinity College, 
Cambridge. 
i860. Sea Dreams : An Idyix. Printed in .1/<7<w/7/,7w'j- JA?^-^!?:/;/,- 
(January). 

TlTHONi'S. Printed in Coriihiil Macazin,-. edited by \V. M. 
Thackeray (February). 

Review of Pocticai Wor/:s of Alfred Tcnuysoii in The A'orth 
Aniiricaii /CiT'u-7c> (January), by C. C. Everett. 

Moral Aspects of lenuyson's Idylls of the King, in Mac- 
niillans Magazine, by J. M. Ludlow, vol. i., pp. 65-72. 

Essay on Tennyson in Poems and Essays, bj' the late Will- 
iam Caldwell Roscoe. edited, with a prefatory memoir, 
by his brotherin law, Richard Holt Hutton. London : 
Chapman & Hall, vol. ii., pp. 1-37. 

Tennyson visited Cornwall. 

1561. Stanzas, Tlie Sailor Hoy. Printed in T'ieloria Pegia, 

edited by Emily Faithfull, Christmas. 

Lines, Ifeleit's ToTcer, printed in quarto pamphlet by Lord 
Dufferin for private circulation. 

£ssays on Englis/i Lileratitre{AUT€d Tennyson, pp. 24S-276), 
by T. McNichoU. London : Pickering. 

Alfred Tennyson (and his wife) visited the Pyrenees, where 
he had been in the autumn of 1S30 with Arthur Hallam. 
On this journey he wrote the lines, " In the Valley of 
Cauteretz," which have reference to his former visit with 
Hallam. On this journey the Tennysons met Arthur 
Hugh Clough travelling for his health. He died two 
months later. (See Keniains of Artlnir Ilugli Clongli, vol. 
i. , pp 264-269.) 

1562. Ii')Vi.LS OK THE King. Xew edition. With a dedication to 

the memory of the late Prince Consort. 
"Ope: May the First, 1S62" (E.xhibition Ode). Sung 
at the opening of the International Exhibition. Printed 
in the daily papers. Accurate version in Eraser's Mag.:- 
ziiie (June). 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. I 55 

A Painter's Camp in the I/ij^klands and Thous^hts A/wiit 

. Art, by Philip Gilbert Hamerton (Tennyson, Word Paint- 
ing and Colour Painting, vol. ii., pp. 252-269). 

An Introduction to English Literature from Chaucer to Ten- 
nyson, by Henry Reed. 

Index to In Mernoriam. London : Edward Moxon & Co., 
pp. 40. 

Analysis of In Memoriam, by the late Rev. F. W. Rob- 
ertson, of Brighton. London : Smith, Elder & Co. 

Tennyson visited Derbyshire and Yorkshire. 

1863. A Welcome (to the Princess Alexandra, March 7). Lon- 

don : Edward Moxon & Co., pp. 4. 
Attempts at Classic Metres in Quantity, in the Comhill 

Magazine (December). 
An essay Concerning Cutting and Carving, hy A. K. H. B. 

(on the changes introduced by Tennyson into his poems), 

in Fraser s Magazine (February). 
Remains in Verse and Prose of Arthur Henry II alia in. 

London : John Murray. The third issue : the first two 
, for private circulation. 

1864. Enoch Arden, etc., by Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet 

Laureate. London : Edward Moxon & Co., Dover 
Street, pp. 178. (This volume is dedicated to his wife.) 

Epitai'h on the Late Duchess of Kent. Printed in I'he 
Court Journal (March 19). Also inscribed on Theed's 
statue at Frogmore. 

Review of Enoch Arden in The Westminster Kevie7o (Octo- 
ber). 

Review of Enoch Arden in Dublin University Magazine 
(October). 

Review of Enoch Arden in Blackwood's Magazine (No- 
vember). 

Review of Enoch Arden in The North British Revie^v 
(August). 

Review of Enoch Arden in the N'orlh American Review 
(October), by J. Russell Lowell. 

Review of Enoch Arden in Harper's Magazine (October), 
by George William Curtis. 

Review of Enoch Arden in the Nouvelle Revue de Pai-is 
(September), by A. Vermorel. 



I 56 A TKNNVSOX PRIMKR. 

U'ords-!('ort/i, Ttnnysoti, aiu/ fin'^c/iim;- : or, run-, Orniitt\ 
ami Grotcsi/iii- Art, by Walter Bagchot, in T/u- A^iUional 
Kt-7'iew (November). Reprinted in Kagehot's " Literary 
Studios." Edited by R. H. Hutton, 1S79. London : 
Longmans. Green & Co., voL ii., pp. 33S-390. 
Alffid Tittnyson. A lecture by Henry Edward Watts, 
delivered at the Town Hall, Prahan, October 10. Mel- 
bourne : Samuel Mullen, Collins Street, East, p. 37. 

Tc-UHVson's JVort/ic-rn Fanner, in J/ai//i/7/ii/i's J/iJi^iizint- 

(October), pp. 486-4S9. By J. ^L Ludlow. 
Notice of Tennyson's work in H. Taine's Ilistoire <;V hi 

lAtt^ratnrr Anglaisc. Paris. Tom. iv., pp. 431-4S3. 
Garibaldi visited Tennyson at Farringf(ird (.\pril 8), and 
planted a ]VcUin<;toiiia gigantca in the grounds as a me- 
morial of his visit. See the reference to "the warrior of 
Caprera" in the poem. To Ulysses {^Dcmeter, and other 
Poiins, 1SS9). 
{So/tucts, by the Rev. Charles [Tennyson] Turner, Vicar of 
Grasby, Lincoln. London and Cambridge : ^L1cmillan & 
Co., pp. viii., 102.) Dedicated to Alfred Tennyson. 
1865. .\ Selkction from the Works of Alfrkd Tknnyson, 
London: Edward Moxon ^^ Co., Dover Street, square 
i2mo, pp. 256. This volume contained six new poems : 
T/ic- Ca/>tai>i, On a Mourner, Three Son tuts to a Coquette, 
Home they brought him siain loith shears. (Rewritten for 
music. Another version. Home they drought her 7i>arrior 
dead, appeared in IVte Tri/teess. The poem is a transla- 
tion from the Anglo-Saxon Gtidrun [see Conybeare's 
A nglo- Saxon 7 '<'<//j']). 

The bibliography of Tennyson. By the Hon. J. Leicester 
Warren. Fortnightly Hc-x'ieiv (October). 

Three Great Teachers of Our Own Time (Carlyle, Tenny- 
son, and Ruskin), by Alexander H. Japp. London : 
Smith. Elder .'t Co., pp. S7-1S6. 

Tennyson was offered and declined a baronetcy. 

Elected a member of the Royal Society. 

Tennyson's mother died February 21, in her eighty-fifth 
year. 

Tennyson visited Weimar and Dresden. 
lS()l). I'ennysoniana : jVotes Bibliogra/>hieal and Critieal on Early 



A TENNYSON PKIMIOR. 157 

Poems of Alfred and Ckaidrs Tciinyann. Basil Montague 
Pickering, Piccadilly. London, W., pi). 170. Hy R. H. 
Shepperd. Published anonymously. 
Review of Enoch Ardcii in the London Quarlerly Review 

(January). 
Paper On a Song in The Princess, in the Shilling Magazine 

(February), pp. 181-184, by George Grove. 
The Last Hundred Years of English Literalnre. Jena. 

By Charles Grant. (Tennyson, pp. 147-162.) 
Commentary on Tears, Ldle Tears, in Macniillans Mag- 
azine (November). 
Translation : Enoch Arden. Oversat of A. Munch. Co- 
penhagen. 
Tennyson visited Cambridge. 
1867. Thk Window ; or. The Loves of the Wren.s. By Alfred 
Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate. Printed at the private 
press of Sir Ivor Bertie Guest, Bart, (now Lord Wim- 
borne), of Canford Manor, near Wimborne, Dorset, son 
of Lady Charlotte Guest, editor of the Mahinogion. With 
dedication and note. (These songs were written for 
music composed by Mr. Arthur [now Sir Arthur] Sullivan, 
and published in 1870.) The original edition was dedi- 
cated as follows : " These little songs, whose almost sole 
merit— at least till they are wedded to music— is that they 
are so excellently printed, I dedicate to the printer." 
Considerai)le changes were made in later editions. 
The Victim, by Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laure- 
ate. Published at the same press. 
Review of Tennyson's Works in Afternoon Lectures on L.it- 
erature and Art (4th series), by J. K. Ingram, LL.D., 
Fellow of Trinity College, and Professor of English Lit- 
erature in the University of Dublin. London : Bell & 
Daldy, pp. 47-94- 
Studies in Tennyson, in Belgravia, by W. S. 
Lectureon "The Sonnetsof Charles and Alfred Tennyson." 
By Richard Chcnevix Trench (Archbishop of Dublin). 
Printed in Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art 
(4th series). London : Bell & Daldy, p. 163. 
Translation : Enoch Arden. Ul'crsetzt von Schellwien 
Ouedlinburg. 



I 58 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

L/yHs of t/i£ King. U/n-rsetzt von \N.Scho\z. Berlin. 
Tennyson visited Dartmoor and Salcombe. 
In this year he purchased the Greenhill estate, on Block- 
down, in Sussex, three miles distant from the village of 
Haslemere, in Surrey. Here was built for him Aldworth 

(a summer and autumn residence) from the designs of his 

friend, Mr. J. T. Knowles, the editor of 77/c- Xi/tcticntk 
Cc'/t/urv. 
The Duke of .-Yrgyll, Mr. Gladstone, and Lord Houghton 

were guests at Farringford in July. 
lS6S. The Victi.m. Printed in <SooJ Il'on/s (January). 

On a Spitefi'l Letter. Printed in Once a /rtV/{- (January).* 
Wages. Printed in JlacmiHan's Magazine (February). 
1S65-1S66 (" I stood on a tower in the wet"). Printed in 

Good /FtTi/j (March). (Since suppressed.) 
Lucretius. Printed in JMacntiu'an's Magazine (May\ and 

New York, in Ezery Saturday (May). 
Article on T/te Arthurian Legends in Tennyson. By S. 

Cheetham, in The Contemporary Jvevie-.o (.\pril). 
Paper On Mr. Tennyson's Lucretius, by Professor R. C. 

Jebb, in Macrnillan's Magazine (June). 
Review of Lucretius in London Quarterly A'tt/Vrc (October) ; 

also in Tinsley's Magazine (July), pp. 610-616. 
A Study of the Works of Alfred Tennyson, by Edward 

Campbell Tainsh. London : Chapman & Hall. (En- 
larged editions published 1S70 and iSg2.) 
Jerrold, Tennyson, and Macaulay. loith Other Critical Es- 
says, by James Hutchison Stirling, LL.D. Edinburgh : 

Edmonston ^^ Douglas, pp. 51-111. 
Translation : Enoch Arden. Cbersetzt von R. WaldmUller. 

Hamburg. 
Translation : Dora. Trad, di G. Zanella. Firenze. (/« 

z'ersi di Giacomo Zanella, vol. i.) 
{Small Tableaux, by the Rev. Charles [Tennyson] Turner. 

Vicar of Grasby, Lincoln. London : Macmillan & Co., 

pp. viii., 114.) 
Tennyson visited at Farringford by Henry Wadsworth 

Longfellow. 

* In a letter to Omce a HWi Tennyson stated of this poem : " It is no particular 
letter th.it I meant. I have dozens of them from one quarter or another," 



A TENNYSON PRIMKR. I 59 

The Holy Grail, and Other Pokms, by Alfred Tenny- 
son, D.C.L., Poet Laureate. London : Strahan & Co., 
56 Ludgate Hill, pp. 222. This volume included The 
Victim, Wages, and Lucretius, The Northern Farmer, 
new style, The Golden Supper, The Higher Pantheism, 
Fhnoer in the Crannied Wall. 

A Concordance to the Entire Works of Alfred Tennyson, 
by D. Barron Brightwell. London : E. Moxon, Son & 
Co., pp. 477. 

Paper on The Holy Grail in The Athenaum (December). 

Notice of Tennyson in an article, "The Poetry of the 
Period," by Alfred Austin, Temple Bar {May). 

Mr. Tenn^'son and Mr. Brownitig, by Edward Dowden, 
M.A., Professor of English Literature, Trinity College, 
Dublin. Printed in Afternoon Lectures on Literature and 
Art {Mi\i series), pp 139-179. Reprinted in Professor 
Dowden's Studies in Literature, Kegan Paul, Trench & 
Co., London. 

Paper on A/odern English Poets, in The Quarterly (April), 

pp. 328-359- 

Translation : Enoch Arden. Ubersctzt von F. W. Weber. 
Leipzig. 

Translation : Aylmers Field. Uhersetzt von F. W. Weber. 
Leipzig. 

Translation : Henoch Arden, door S. J. van den Bergh. 
Hage. 

Tennyson visited North Wales. Elected an Honorary Fel- 
low of Trinity College, Cambridge. 

Article, The Idylls of the King, by Henry Alford, in The 
Contemporary Review (January). 

Paper, The Epic of Arthur, in the Ediiilntrgli Review 
(April). 

Review of The Laureate and his Arthuriad in the London 
Quarterly Review (April). 

Modern Men of Letters Honestly Criticised, by J. Hain 
Friswell. London : Hodder & Stoughton. (Alfred Ten- 
nyson, pp. 145-156.) 

Paper, Alfred Tennyson, in the N'uova Antologia, Florence 
(February), by E. Camerini. 

Translation : Enoch Arden. Trad, par M. de la Rive. Paris. 



l6o A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Sir John Simeon, Tennyson's friend and neighbour, died in 

Switzerland. 
The verses, " In the garden at Swainston," were composed 

at this time. 

1871. The Last Tournament,* contributed to The Coutemporary 

Rcvifw (December). 

Article, The Songs of the Wrens, by the Rev. H. R. Ha- 
vveis, in The Saint Paul 's Magazine (February). 

Our Living Poets : An Essay on Criticism, by H. Buxton 
Forman. London : Tinsley. (Alfred Tennyson, pp. 27- 
69.) 

Mr. Tennyson's Poetry, in The N'orth British Pez>ie7c> (Jan- 
uary), pp. 379-425- 

Translation : La Cena cV Oro di Alfredo Tennyson. Trad, 
di Lodovico Biagi. Firenze. 

1872. Garkth and Lynette, etc., by Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., 

Poet Laureate. London : Strahan & Co., Ludgate Hill, 
pp. 136. 

Library Edition of Tennyson' s JTorhs. 6 vols. Strahan 
& Co. (1872-73). (Several of the Juvenilia were re- 
stored in this edition. It included two early sonnets, 
Alexander and The Bridesmaid ; also The Lliird of Feb- 
ruary, iSj3 [printed in Examiner, January, 1852, over 
the signature of Merlin, and now first acknowledged]. 
Literary Squabbles [anonymously printed in Punch, March 
7, 1846, as Afterthought^, verses, 7^o the Queen, and some 
additional passages in " The Ldylls of the King.") 

Review of Tennyson's poetry in Macmtllan's Magazine (De- 
cember), by Richard Holt Hutton. 

Article, Tennyson s Charm, by Robert Buchanan, in The 
Saint Paul's Magazine (March). 

Tennyson visited Norway. 

Translations : Enoch Arden. Ay liner's Field ; Ausgeiodhlte 
Diehtungen (1870), and /\.'oenig's Ldyllen (1872), von 

* As printed in the Review, the two lines, afterwards altered, following •' 

" He rose, he tiirn'd, then dinging round her neck, 
Claspt it," 
read I 

" But while he bowed himself to lay 
Warm kisses in the hollow of her throat." 



A TENNYSON TRIMER. l6l 

H. A. Feldmann. Hamburg. Aiisgetoahlte Gcdichtc, uber- 
sctzt von M. Rugard. Elbing. 

1873. A Comparative Estimate of Modern English Poets, by J. De- 

vey. E. Moxon, Son & Co. (Alfred Tennyson, pp. 275- 

336.) 
Article, Mr. Tennyson as a Botanist, by J. Hutchison, in The 

Saint Paul's Magazine (October). 
Tennyson, by Walter Irving. Edinburgh : Maclachlan & 

Stewart, pp. 28. 
Notes and Marginalia, by J. H. Smith. London. 
Article, Lincolnshire Scenery and Character as Illustrated 

by Mr. Tennyson, by the Rev. Drummond Rawnsley, in 

Macmillan's Magazine (December). 
Master Spirits, by Robert Buchanan. London : Henry 

S. King & Co., pp. 349 {Tennyson, Heine, and De Mussel, 

pp. 54-88). 
Review of Idylls of the King in the Contemporary Review 

(May). 
Garcth and Lynette, in The Spectator and The Athenccum. 

1874. A Welcome to Marie Alexandrovna, Duchess ok Edin- 

burgh. Printed in 77/^ /Ywcj, and separately on a single 
sheet. 

(Cabinet edition of Tennyson's works. H. S. King & Co. 
In this edition appeared the poem in memory of Sir John 
Simeon, In the Garden at Swains ton ; also The Voice and 
the Peak, England and America in 1^82, and an addi- 
tional passage in Merlin and Vivien.) 

Translation : Zum Geddchtniss, von Agnes von Bohlen. 
Berlin. 

1875. Queen Mary : A Drama, by Alfred Tennyson. London : 

H. S. King & Co., pp. viii., 278. 
Prefatory sonnet to Lord Lyttelton's Memoir of W. H. 

Brookfield, prefixed to a volume of his " Sermons" 

(" Brooks, for they called you so that knew you 

best"). 
(Author's edition of Tennyson's works. H. S. King & Co., 

6 vols., 1875-1877. In this edition Maud was for the first 

time entitled y]/rt«r/.- A Monodrama. Changes were made 

in the text of various poems.) 
Notes on Queen Mary, in Macmillan's Magazine. 



lOJ A lEXN VSON rUlMKR. 

Review of (Jttcr'i Mary in T/ie Aiiuiciiiy, by Mr. Andrew 
Lang. 

Review of Qiiiun J/ary in V'/t<- (Juar/i-r/v /C-i'ii-n' (July), pp. 
231-24S. 

Victorian Potts, by Edmund Clarence Stedman. Boston : 
Houghton. Mifflin & Co. London : Chatto iS: Windus, 
1S76. The fifth and sixth chapters deal with the poetry 
of Tennyson. 

T/ie Ri-iiiiion 0/ our Lit<:raturc : Essays upon Carlyle, 
Browning, and Tennyson, by George McCrie. London : 
Hodder & Stoughton (Tennyson, pp. iio-iSo). 

Article, Virgil ami Tiiinvsoii, in B!ack:cooJ's J/acazinr 
(November), by " .\ Lincolnshire Rector" — the Rev. 
Drummond Rawnsley. 

Translations : Tlu- May Qnivn, a/. A. Falck. Christiania. 
— £nit/ and Elaini-, translated by L. Gisbert. — /'//<• May 
Quten, trad, dci Marchesi Luigi e Raniero de Calboli. 
Roma. 
187(1. lL\KOi.n : A Drama, by Alfred Tennyson. London : 
Henry S. King iS: Co., 1S77 (post-dated), pp. viii., 
161. 

Qtuin Mary was produced under the management of Mr. 
Henry Irving at the Lyceum in April. 

Tennyson again visited the Pyrenees. 

Browning dedicated the two volumes of his "■ Selections" 
■'To Alfred Tennysi\n : In Poetry, illustrious and con- 
summate ; in Friendship, noble and sincere." 

Translations : Idilli, Liriclii, Miti, <• Z("j,v//</<", £not- Ardin, 
Quadri Dramatici. Tradnzioni di Carlo Faccioli. Ve- 
rona. — Fircnzc, Sticctssori U Monnic-r, pp. 441 (2d edition, 
1S79). — Enock Ardcn di Alfredo Tennyson : AV<<7/j in 
trrsi Italiani di Angelo Saggioni. Padova. 1S76. — Stabil- 
inif-nti Tros/t-rini, pp. 51. A'<>sst" Sto/'oli-Xarrari . — A'o- 
nnns^ Art/tiir oc/i /laus /Hiddar^. L^psala. — IdylUr om 
Kong Arthur, af. A. Munch. Copenhagen. —£'/i<vA 
Arden : deutsch von A. Strodtniann. Berlin. 
1S77. Prefatory Sonnet to T/it .Vine-ternt// (>///// ri- (first number, 
March), edited by Mr. J- T. Knowles. 

Sonnet, Mont<ni-gro, in the same number. 

Sonnet, 7'o I'iotor //ngo. in /"';;• AVm/tv;//^ (>w///rr (June). 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 163 

Translation : Achilles over tJie Tniich {Iliad, Book iS), in 

The Nineteenth Century (August). 
Lines in memory of Sir John Franlvlin on the cenotaph in 

Westminster Abbey. 
Review of Harold in Tlie Academy, by John Addinglon 

Synionds. 
Article on Tennyson in TJte International Rcvieio, New 

Yoric (May), by Bayard Taylor, vol. iv., pp. 397-418. 
Longfellow's Sonnet to Tennyson, entitled Wapentake, 

printed in The j\tlantie Monthly (December). 
Translation : Sea Dreams, Aylincrs Field, af. F. L. Myns- 

ter. — Elaine. A. Hjelmstjerna. 

1578. Sir Richard Grenville : A Ballad of the Fleet, 

printed in The A^ineteenth Century (March) (afterwards 

named The Revenge). 
The Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson, 13 vols. London : 

Kegan Paul & Co., 1878- 1SS2. 
Studies in the Idylls : An Essay on J\/r. Tennyson's Idylls 

of the A'i'ig, by Henry Elsdale. London : H. S. King 

& Co., pp. vii., 197. 
Article on Tennyson, in The Literary World (September), 

by P. Bayne. 
Tennyson visited Ireland. 
Lionel Tennyson married Miss Eleanor Locker. 

1579. The Lover's Tale, by Alfred Tennyson. London: Kegan 

Paul & Co., pp. 95. 

Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice. 

The Defence of Lueknow, printed in Tlie Nineteenth Cen- 
tury (April). 

The Falcon, produced at the St. James' Theatre, with Mrs. 
Kendal in the part of the heroine (December). 

Lessons from my Masters {C&r\y\Q, Tennyson, and Ruskin), 
by Peter Bayne, London : John Clarke & Co., pp. 437. 

The Poets Laureate of England, by Walter Hamilton (Al- 
fred Tennyson, pp. 263-300). 

Tennysoniana. 2d edition, enlarged (R. H. Shepherd). 

Notice of The Lover's Tale in The .Icademy, by Edmund 
Gosse. 

Notice of The Lover's Vale in The Congregationalist, vol. 
viii., pp. 672-681. 



104 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Notice of The Lover s Talc in Frascr's Magaziiic, vol. c, 
pp. 110-116. 

Notice of T/w Lo7'i-rs Tale in T/ie Canadian JMotitltly, vol. 
xvi., pp. 221-223. 

Sketch of the Life of Tennyson in TJu- Atlantic Monthly^ 
Vol. c.xliv, pp 356-361, by J. H. Ward. 

The Tennyson Birthday Book, edited by Emily Shakspear. 
London. 

The Rev. Charles Tennyson Turner died April 15. 
iSSo. B.VLLADS, AND OTHER PoEMS, by Alfred Tennyson, pp. vi., 
1S4. London : Kegan Paul & Co. 

The Works of Alfred Tennyson, with portrait and illustra- 
tions, I vol., pp. iv., 665. London : Kegan Paul is: Co., 
1881 (1S80). 

Poem, De Profit ndis, printed in 'J'he A'ineteenth Century 
(May). 

Lines, Midnii^ht, June 30, 1879, prefixed to collected son- 
nets, old and new, by Charles Tennyson Turner. Lon- 
don : Kegan Paul & Co., pp. xxii., 390. 

Two poems ( The City Child and Minnie and IVinnie), 
printed in St. Xieholas, an American magazine for chil- 
dren. 

Translation : Ilarald : Ein Drama. Deittseh 7'on A. Graf 
Wickenburg, pp. 137. Hamburg (printed Altona). 

Poets in the Pulpit, by the Rev. H. R. Haweis, London 
(Tennyson, pp. 33-115). 

A A'ew Study of Tennyson, by J. Churton Collins, in The 
Cornhill J/a^a^ine (January and July, and July, 1S81). 
Same articles in Littell's Living Ai:;e, vol. cxlvi. 

Sonnet, by Theodore Watts, " To Alfred Tennyson, on 
his publishing, in his seventy-first year, the most richly 
various volume of English verse that has appeared in his 
own century." 

Review of 'J'ennysons Poems (with portrait) in the British 
Quarterly Pevie~c: The same article in Littell's JJving 
Age (December), Potter's American Monthly, vol. xvi. 

Parody of Tennyson's Higher Pantheism in 'The Hepta- 
log^ia ; or. the Se7Yn against Sense. (A. C. Swinburne.) 
iSSi. Despair, by Alfred Tennyson, printed in 7'he A'ineteenth 
Century (November). 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 165 

Charge ok the Heavy Brigadk, liy Alficd TcMinyson, 
printed in Macmillan s Mai^azine. 

The Cup, produced at the Lyceum Theatre by Henry Irv- 
ing (January 3). 

Alfred Tennyson, //is Life and Works, by W. E. Wace. 
Edinburgh : Macniven & Wallace, pp. vii., 203. 

A Key to Tennyson s In A/einoriain, by Alfred Gatty, 
pp. xi., 144. L(3ndon : D. Bogue. Worksop (printed). 
(2d edition, new and revised. London : George Bell & 
Sons, 1882 ; 3d edition, pp. xxvii., T48, 1885.) 

Review of Ballads, and Other Poems, in 7'he Edinburgh Re- 
view, vol. cliv., pp. 486-515. 

Review oiBallads, and Other Poems, in TJie International Re- 
viezv, vol. X., pp. 178-183. 

Article on Tennyson s Ballads in The Congregationalist, vol. 
X., pp. 53-60. 

Article on The Cup \v\ Appleton's Journal (ixova I'he Satur- 
day Review), vol. XXV., pp. 253-256. 

"The Performance of The Cup a.X. the Lyceum," in Saint 
James' Afagazine, vol. xlviii., pp. 195-203. 

Article on The Idylls of the A'ing, by R. W. Boodle, in 
The Canadian A/onthly, vol. xix., pp. 379-398. 

Article on Tennyson and Mtisset in The Fortnightly Rcviezu 
(February), by A. C. Swinburne. (Reprinted in Swin- 
burne's A/iscella nil's.) 

Same article in Eclectic A/agazine, vol. xcvi., pp. 600-616. 

A Study of Tennyson, by R. H. Stoddard, in IVie North 
American Revieio (July), pp. 82-107. 

Article on Air. Tennyson s New Volume in Marmillan''s 
Magazine (January), by Sidney Colvin. 

Travesty ol Despair, by A. C. Swinburne, in The Fortnightly 
Reidew, entitled Disgust (October). 

Atheism and Suicide. A Reply to Mr. Tennyson, pp. 8, 
by G. W. Foote. London : Freethought Publishing 
Co. 
The De Profundis of Alfred Tennyson : Remodelled by 

Aletamorphosis. London : E. W. Allen. 
Papers on Tennyson in Colburn's New Alonthly Magazine, 

vol. clxix., pp. 47-68 ; 131-147 ; 241-257. 
Review of Ballads, and Other Poems. Articolo crilico di 



l66 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Enrico Nencioni, nel Fa)ifulla della Donictiica. Rome. 

(April.) 
Trajislatioii : A/aria Tudor. Ilisiorische Dravia i fi'iir 

Akter. Ovcrsat af. F. L. Mynster (in verse), pp. 280. 

Kjbenham. 
Translation : La Carica della Brigata Lyglit. Le Due 

Sorelle. In Fiori del nord : Versione di Moderne Poesie 

Tedesche e Inglese di Pietro Turati. Milano, pp 133- 

137- 
Tennyson elected Vice-President of the Welsh National 

Eisteddfod. 
18S2. The Promise of May produced at the Globe Theatre under 

the management of Mrs. Bernard Beere. 
The Charge of the Heavy Brigade, printed in Macniillan'' s 

Magazine (March). 
Lines To Virgil, in The Nineteenth Century (November). 
English Dramatists of To-day, by William Archer. (Ten- 
nyson, pp. 334-351-) 
A Study of The Princess, by S. E. Dawson. London : 

Sampson Low & Co., pp. 120 (also Montreal : Dawson 

Brothers). 
A Lecture on The Religious Signi fieanee of Tennyson s 

Despair, by Thomas Walker. London : Eliot Stock, 

pp. 32. 
Notice of Tennyson's Despair in The JModern^ Review, vol. 

iii., pp. 462-473. By C. Shakspeare. 
Notice of Tennyson's Despair in The Congregationalist , vol. 

ii., pp. 824-831. By J. H. Hallowell. 
Notice of Tennyson's Charge of the Heavy Brigade in The 

Literary World, vd\. xiii., p. 97. By W. H. Chamberlain. 
Catholic Musings on Tennyson's In Menioriain, in Tlie 

Catholic World, vol. xxxiv., pp. 205-21 1. 
The Literary Career of Tennyson, in The Literary World, 

vol. xiii., pp. 280, 281. 
Review of I'he Promise of May, in I'he Academy, vol. xxii., 

PP- 370, 371, by F. Wedmore. 
Review ot The Promise of May in IVie Saturday Review, 

vol. liv., pp. 670, 671. 
Review of The Promise of May in The Spectator, vol. Iv., 

pp. 1474, 1475. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 167 

An article on Maud in Domcnica Litteraria, Rome (March 
19), by Enrico Nencioni. 

Translation : Henoch Arden. . . . In het Nederlandsch be- 
werkt door J. L. Wertheim, pp. 53. Amsterdam. 

Tennyson visited Lombardy. 

Lines, Frater Ave atqiic Vale, printed in The Nineteenth 
Century (March). 

Poems, by Alfred Tennyson, 2 vols. London : Kegan Paul 
& Co. (50 copies on large paper.) 
1883. Article on Tennyson in The Overland Monthly (U. S.), vol. 
i., pp. 17-33, by T. H. Rearden. 

Article on Tennyson, with portrait, in Harper's Monthly 
Magazine, vol. Ixviii., pp. 21-41, by Anne Thackeray 
Ritchie. 

Paper on Tennyson and Milton, in The Presbyterian Re- 
view, vol. iv., pp. 681-709, by H. J. Van Dyke. (Re- 
printed in The Poetry of Tmnyson. London : Elkin 
Mathews & John Lane.) 

Articles on Tennyson as a Plagiarist, in The Literary 
World, vol. xiv., p. 291 ; vol. xiv., pp. 272, 273, by E. L. 
Didier ; vol. xiv., pp. 327, 328, by J. Hooper. 

Article on Tennyson's Acceptance of a Peerage in l^te Sat- 
urday Jievieiu, vol. Ivi., pp. 751, 752. 

Article on Tennyson's Acceptance of a Peerage in Hie 
Spectator, vol. Ivi., pp. 1577, 1578. 

Article on Tennyson's Poems in The Spectator, vol. Ivi., 

pp. 355-357- 
The Earlier and Less-known Poems of Tennyson, by C. E. 

Mathews. Birmingham, pp. 34. 
Articles on In Memoriam and The Idylls of the Ki)ig in 

Fanfulla della Dotneniea, by Enrico Nencioni. Rome. 

(May and September.) 
Translations : Vier Idyllen van Konig Arthur. (A Dutch 

translation in prose, pp. viii., 116.) Amsterdam. 
Poemas . . . Enoch Arden, Gareth y Lynette, Merlin y 

Bibiana, La Reina Ginebra, Dora, La Maya, puestos en 

Castellano (in prose) por D. V. de Arana, e' illustrados 

con dibujos originales de D. J. Riudavets, etc., pp. 302. 

Barcelona. 
(Part of the " Biblioteca Verdaguer.") 



1 68 A TENNYSON TRIMER. 

Alaj-dronnhigen . . . 07't'rsnt af. F. L. Mynster, pp. 12. 
(No. 65 of " Den indre Missions Forlagsskrifter.") 

Tennyson took a house in Belgrave Square, London, and 
lived for some time in town. 

Tennyson accompanied Mr. W. E. Gladstone on a sea trip 
to Copenhagen. On his return he was offered and ac- 
cepted a peerage. Gazetted Baron of Aldworth and Far- 
ringford, January, 1884. 
1884. The Cup and The Falcon, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 
Poet Laureate. London : Macmillan & Co., pp. 146 
(printed in Edinburgh). 

Becket, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate. Lon- 
don : Macmillan & Co., pp. 213 (printed in Edinburgh). 

Lines, Early Spring, in an American periodical. The 
Youth's Companion. 

The following lines, written in youth, were published in a 
pamphlet (which also contained a poem by Browning) : 

" Not he that breaks the dams, but he 
That thro' the channels of the State 
Conveys the people's wish is great ; 
His name is pure, his fame is free." * 

Introductory verses to Jiosa Rosarmn, by E. V. B. (the 
Hon. Mrs. Boyle), published in this year. 

Freedom. Printed in Alacmillan s Magazine for December. 

The Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (a new and revised 
edition in seven vols., and also in one vol.). London : 
Macmillan & Co. (printed in Edinburgh). 

The Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. School edition, 
4 parts. London : Macmillan & Co. 

The Passing of Arthur, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 
London: Macmillan & Co., pp. 24. 

Tennyson's In Alemoriam — Its Purpose and Structure, 
by J. F. Genung. London : Macmillan & Co., pp. vi., 
199 (also Boston, Mass. : Houghton & Co.). 

Lord Tennyson : A Biographical Sketch, by H. J. Jen- 
nings. London : Chatto & Windus, pp. vii., 270. 

* The pamphlet was published in connexion with a Shalcespere exhibition at 
the Albert Hall in aid of the Chelsea Hospital for Women. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 169 

Tennyson's Allusions to Christ, by J. Hogben, in The Sun- 
day Magazine, vol. xiii., pp. 761-764. 

Articles on Tennyson's Becket. The Academy, vol. xxvi., 
pp. 421,422, by J. W. Mackail. 

Articles on Tennyson's Becket. The Saturday Review, vol, 
Iviii., pp. 757, 758. 

Articles on Tennyson's Becket. The Spectator, vol. Ivii., 
pp. 1699, 1700. 

Articles on Tennyson's Cup and Falcon. The Spectator, 
vol. Ivii., pp. 316, 317. 

Articles on Tennyson's Cup and Falcon. The Athenaum, 
1884, vol. i., pp. 319-321. 

Article on Tennyson's Holy Grail. The Congregationalist, 
vol. xiii., pp. 463-471, by H. Evans. 

Article on Tennyson's hi Memoriam and the Bible. Quar- 
terly Revieiv, vol. clviii., pp. 162-183. 

(Same article in Littell's Living Age, vol. clxii., pp. 
549-561.) 

The Genesis of Tenttyson s Maud. The North American 
Review, vol. cxxxix., pp. 356-361, by R. H. Shepherd. 

Letter on Dawson's Study of Tennyson's Princess. The 
Academy, vol. xxv., p. 367. 

Tennyson on Daiusons Study of The Princess. The Critic, 
vol. iv., pp. 223, 224. 

Trifles by Tennyson. The Critic, vol. v., pp. 268, 269; 
vol. vi., pp. 301, 302, by W. J. Rolfe. 

" A respectful operatic perversion of Tennyson's ' Princess,' 
in three acts, entitled Princess Ida ; or, Castle Adamant," 
etc., by W. S. Gilbert. London: Chappel & Co., pp. 48. 

Parodies of the Works of American Authors, by Walter 
Hamilton. London. (Parodies of the poems of Alfred, 
Lord Tennyson, vol. i.) 

Translation : Koenigs Idyllen : In metrum des Orig. fibers, 
von C. Weiser. Leipzig (1883-1886). 

Tennyson was elected President of the Society of Authors. 

Hon. Hallam Tennyson married Miss Audrey Boyle. 

TiRESiAS, AND OTHER PoEMS, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 
D.C.L., P.L. London : Macmillan & Co., pp. viii., 203 
(printed in Edinburgh). This volume bore the following 
dedication: "To my good friend, Robert Browning, 



IJO A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

whose genius and geniality will best appreciate what may 

be best and make most allowance for what may be worst, 

this volume is affectionately dedicated." 
Lyrical Poems. Selected and annotated by F. T. Palgrave. 

London : Macmillan & Co., pp. vii., 270. (Printed in 

Edinburgh.) 
(Part of the " Golden Treasury Series.") 
The Princess : A Medley. Edited with notes by W. J. 

Rolfe, with illustrations. J. R. Osgood & Co., Boston. 

(Printed in Cambridge, Mass.) 
The Poetical Works of Lord Tennyson. Complete edition 

from the author's text. Illustrated, etc. New York : 

T. Y. Crowell & Co., pp. viii., 896. (Printed in Cam- 
bridge, Mass.) 
The Fleet, printed in The Times (April 23). 
" To 11. K. //. Princess Beatrice," printed in The Times 

(July 23). 
Vastness, printed in Macmillan' s Magazine (November). 
A Review of Tennyson s Poetry in The Keviie ties Deux 

Momles, by Aug. Filon, torn. Ixxi., pp. 70-roi. 
A Review of Tennyson's Poetry in The Contemporary /\e- 

z'ieta, by Hon. Roden Noel (February). 
(Reprinted in Tssays anil Poets, London, pp. 223-255 [1886]). 
Same article in LitteWs Liz'im^ Age, vol. clxiv., and Eclectic 

Magazine, vol. civ. 
Review of Becket in The Catholic World, by M. F. Egan, 

vol. xlii., pp. 382-395. 
Review of Becket in The Month, by C. Nicholson, vol. 

XXXV., pp. 509-520. 
Review of Becket in The Athenceum, 18S5, vol. i., pp. 7-9. 
Review oi Becket in The Theatre, by F. Hawkins, vol. 1., 

pp. 53-61. 
Review of Becket in Ufacmilhui's Magazine, vol. li., pp. 287- 

294. 
Review of Becket in Blackrcooil's Magazine, vol. cxxxviii., 

pp. 57-66. 
Review of Becket in Eclectic Magazine, vol. cv. , pp. 418- 

425- 
The Meaning of The Idylls of the King, by C. B. Pallen, 

in The Catholic JVorld, vol. xli., pp. 43-54. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. I7I 

Article on The Lyrics of Ti'iiiiysoii, in The Sprctator, vol. 

Iviii., pp. 1319, 1320. 
Review of Tir esias, and Othe7- Poems, in The Spectator, vol. 

Iviii., pp. 1649-1651. 
Review of Tircsias, and Other Poems, in The Academy, by 

T. H. Caine, vol. xxviii., pp. 403-405. 
Review of Tiresias, and Other Poems, in The Athenceum, 

1885, vol. ii., pp. 831-834. 
Review of Tiresias, and Other Poems, in The Saturday Re- 

view, vol. Ix. , pp. 810-81 1. 
Review of Vastness in The Spectator, vol. Iviii., pp. 1466, 

1467. 
Paper on Tennyson in Urbaiia Scripta, by A. Gallon. 

London : Eliot Stock, pp. 36-68. 
Translation : Enoch Arden . . . recato in versi I tali a ni da 

A. Soggini, p. 109. Firenze. (See 1876.) 
1886. LocKSLEY Hall Sixty Years After, etc., by Alfred, Lord 

Tennyson, D.C.L., P.L. London and New York: Mac- 

millan & Co., pp. 201 (printed in Edinburgh). 
The Poetical Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 10 vols. 

London and New York : Macmillan & Co. (printed in 

Edinburgh), 
The Dramatic Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 4 vols. 

Macmillan & Co. 
Ode to India and the Colonies. Written for the opening 

of the Colonial Exhibition in London (May 4). 
The Poetry of Tennyson, in The London Quarterly Review, 

vol. Ixv., pp. 243-247. 
Tennyson or Darwin, by Algernon C. Swinburne, in 

Studies in Prose and Verse, pp. 141-145. 
Tennysott as a Conservative, in The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 

Ivii., pp. 423-426. 
Tennyson s Later Poems, in The Leisure Hour, by S. G. 

Green, vol. xxxv.,pp. 99-101. 
Review of Locksley Hall in Youth and Age in The Specta- 
tor, vol. lix., pp. 1706, 1707, 1750, 1751. 
Review of Locksley Hall in Youth and Age, in The Saturday 

Revieiv, vol. Ixii., pp. 842, 843. 
Philosophy of Locksley Hall, in The Southern Pivoiiac, by 

T. Canebrake, vol. v., p. 704. 



172 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Translation : II Primo Diverbio . . . Tradtizioiic (of the 
poem entitled The First Quarrel), di E. Castelnuovo, 
p. 19. Venezia : Nozze Bordica. Selvatico. 

Enoch Arden. Students' Tauchnitz anjl. in it ]Vdrterbuch, 
von Dr. A. Hamann. Leipzig, p. 24. 

(Bibliothek der Gesammt-Literatur.) 

Tennyson visited Cambridge in August. 

Lionel Tennyson died on the voyage home from India 
(April 20). 

(Jack and the BcanStalk, by Hallam Tennyson. London : 
Macmillan & Co. Illustrations from Caldecott.) 
1887. The Jubih-L' of our Queen (printed under title, Carmen Sec- 
ulare), in Macmillan^ s Magazine (April). A souvenir 
poem by Lord Tennyson. Designs by F. Marriott. Lon- 
don : Eyre & Spottiswoode, i6mo. 
The Brook. Illustrated by A. Woodruff. London : Mac- 
millan & Co., obi. 8vo. 

Vox Claniantis. A comparison analytical and critical be- 
tween the Columbus at Seville of Joseph Ellis . 
and The Columbus of the Poet Laureate. London : 
W. Stewart & Co., p. 32, 4°. 

An essay on Tennyson's Idylls of the A'ino-, by A. Ha- 
mann. Berlin, p. 25. 

Review of Lockslcy Hall Sixty Years After in The Church 
Heview, vol, xlix. , pp. 283-289. 

Review of Lockslcy Hall Sixty Years After in The Atlantic 
Monthly, vol. lix., pp. 705-708. 

Review of Lockslcy Hall Sixty Years After in The Congre- 
gational Review, vol. i., pp. 97-105. 

Review of Lockslcy Hall Sixty Years After in THackinood's 
Magazine, vol. cxli. , pp. 129-131. 

Review of Lockslcy Hall Sixty Years After in The Dial 
(Chicago), by W. M. Payne, vol. vii., pp. 246-248. 

Review of Lockslcy Hall Sixty Years After in 7'he AVry 
Englander, by J. R. Bacon, vol. xlvi., pp. 155- 
167. 

Review of Lockslcy Hall Sixty Years After in The AVrc 
Princeton Peviezv, vol. iii., pp. 265-271. 

Review of Lockslcy Hall Sixty Years After in The Academy, 
by H. C. Beeching, vol. xxxi., pp. i, 2. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 1 73 

Review of Lockslcy Hall Sixty Years After in The Athena:- 

71711, 1887, vol. i., pp. 31-33. 
Review of Loeksley Hall Sixty Years After in To-Day, vol. 

vii., pp. 93-95- 
Review of Loeksley Hall Sixty Years After in Leisure Hour, 

vol. xxxvi., pp. 137-140. 
Review of Loeksley Hall and Loeksley Hall Sixty Years 

After and The Jubilee in The Nineteenth Century, by 

W. E. Gladstone, vol. xxi., pp. 1-18. 
Same article in LittelPs Living Age, vol. clxxii., and in 

Eclectic Magazine, vol. cviii. 
Article on Loeksley Hall and Liberalism in The National 

Revie7v, by M. Dyncley, vol. viii., pp. 641-647. 
Article on The Palace of Art — growth of the poem — in The 

Ne7v Princeton Rez'ie'v, by H. Van Dyke, vol. iv., pp. 

65-74- 
A Word about Tennyson, by Walt Whitman, in The Critic, 

vol. X., pp. I, 2. 
Translation : Ausgezvdhlte Dichtungen. Ubersetzt von A. 

Strodtmann. Hildburghausen, 1867. Leipzig, 1887-1890 

(Meyer's Volksbiicher). 
Selections from Tennyson, with notes for the use of Italians, 

by T. C. Cann. Florence. (Part of " Cann's Scholastic 

Series.") 
Enoch Arden. Trad, par Y,.. Marmier. Paris. 
Tennyson visited St. David's and the Channel Islands. 
The Complete Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyso.v. 

A new edition in 8 vols. Macmillan & Co. {7' he Idyll of 

Geraint was in this edition divided into The Marriage of 

Geraint and Geraitit and Enid a.r\d some suppressed poems 

restored.) 
Selections from Tennyson, with introduction and notes by 

F. J. Rowe and W. T. Webb. Macmillan & Co., pp. xiv., 

154 (printed in Glasgow). 
Tennyson in Literary Essays, by R. H. Hutton. 3d edi- 
tion, pp. 361-436. 
Article on Tennyson in I^he Methodist I\e7>ie7v, by C. J. 

Little, vol. Ixx., pp. 203-221. 
Review of The Ldylls of the King in The Dublin Revieiv, Ijy 

J. M. Stone, vol. ciii., pp. 259-274. 



174 A TICNNVSDN I'KIMKk. 

A Conipaiiioii to In MciiioriaDi, by Eli/.abcth R. Chap- 
man. London and New York : Macmillan & Co., pp. 72. 
Studies on the Legeud of the Holy Grail, by Alfred Nutt. 

London : David Nutt. 
Is Tennyson a Spiritualist i' in T/ie Pall Mall Gazette 

(December 20). 
Dethroning Tennyson, by A. C. Swinburne, in The A^ine- 

teenth CentiMry (January). 
The Tennyson Flora, by L. H. Grindon. (Appendi.v to 

the Report of the Manchester Field Naturalists ami Arch- 

seological Society, 1SS7.) 
Tennysonian Trees, in The Gardeners' Magazine (Decem- 
ber 29). 
Tennyson's Idylls, by A. V. Dorsey, in The American 

Magazine (May). 
Tennyson' s Idylls, by R. W. Boodle, in 'J'he Canadian 

Monthly (April). 
Translations : Loeksley Hall . , , iibersetzt von F. Frei- 

ligrath {Locf:sley Hall nach seehzig Jahren. A/is devi 

Englisehen, von J. Feis), pp. 59. Leipzig. 
Loeksley Hall seehzig Jahre spdter. A iitorisierte iilhrsetzung, 

von Karl B. Esmerch, p. 32. Gotha. 
Enoch Arden frei bearbeitet filr die Jiigend. llausbiblio- 

thck. Leipzig, pp. 2g. 
Enoch Arden. Traduction fran^aise litterale (in prose), par 

R. Courtois, pp. 33. Paris. 
Enoch Arden. Te.xte Anglais. An not/ par R. Courtois, 

pp. viii., 41. Paris. 
Idylles et Fohnes. Traduction par A. Buissondu Berger. Paris. 
Enid metrisch vertaald door D. E. M. van Herwerden nut 

platen naar G. Dore, pp. 70. Zwolle. 
La Prima Lite. Estratto dal Giornale " La Baltaglia 

Bizantina." Traduzione di V. T. Pavolini. Bologna. 
[SS9. DKMKri'-.K, AND Otiikr PoiCMS, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 

D.C.L., P.L. London and New York : Macmillan i!v: Co. , 

pp. vi., 175 (printed Edinburgh). 
The Throstle in The A^ew Ke7'ie-a< (October). (Published in 

May as a leaflet, title and one page of te.xt.) 
The IVorhs of Alfred, lord Tennyson, in one vol., pp. v. 

S07. Macmillan ^t Co. 



A 'n':NNYS()N rkiMicK. 175 

Idylls of the King, In Tioclve Books (first so entitled in 
this edition). 

Interludes, Lyrics, and Idylls, from the poetic and dramatic 
works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, pp. 190. Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co., Boston and New York. (Printed in Cam- 
bridge, Mass.) 

Poeiiis ( To luhvard Lear on his Travels in Greece, The Pal- 
ace of Art, 'The Daisy). Illustrated by Edward Lear. 
(With a memoir of Lear by F. Lushington.) London and 
New York : Boussod, Valadon & Co., pp. iv., 51 (one 
hundred copies printed and signed by Tennyson). 

Lancelot and /Claine, with notes by C. C. Flanagan. 2 parts. 
Madras. (Being pp. 77-102 of Macmillan's School Edition 
bound up with notes.) 

The Idylls of the Kint^. . . . Illustrated. In shorthand, by 
A. G. Doughty, ff. 102. Montreal : The Dominion Illus- 
trated Press. 

"Prolegomena to In Afeutoriain." With an index to the 
poem, pp. vi., 177. Boston and New York: Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co. (Printed in Cambridge, Mass.) 

Ecrivains modernes de I'Ani^leterre. Deuxi6me S6rie. (Al- 
fred Tennyson, p. 349.) By Emile Montd'gut. (Printed 
in Paris.) Coulommiers. 

Essays on Literature and Ethics, by W. A. O'Connor. 
(Tennyson's Palace of Art, pp. 25-56.) Manchester. 

Lord Tennyson. Studi, di Francesco Rodriguez. Roma, 
pp. 198. 

Alfrdd Tenttyson. Kirdly. Idylljei for<lil(illa es fievezetle 
Szasyk. (with critical introduction), pp. 556. Buda- 
pest. 

Tennyson's Touch with A^«/Mr^ (illustrated), in The Sunday 
Ma^i^azine, by A. Lamont, vol. xviii., pp. 378-387. 

Tennyson's Spiritual Service to his Generation, in The 
Andover Review, vol. xii., pp. 291-296. 

Paper on L.ord 'Tennyson, with portrait, in Tinsley's Mai;a- 
zinc, pp. 580-584. 

Tennyson and Brotvnin;^, in 'J'he Spectator, vol. Ixiii., pp. 
879, 880. 

Tennyson as a Prophet, in 'J'he Nineteenth Century, by 
F. H. Myers, vol. xxv., pp. 381-396. 



176 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

(Same article in LittclVs Liviui:; Age, vol. clxxx., and Eclectic 
Magazine, vol. cxii.) 

Tennyson at Eighty. Sonnet to Tennyson on his birth- 
day, by Theodore Watts, in Tlie Athenceum, vol. ii., 
p. 191. 

Tennyson at Eighty. Sonnet by the Rev. H. D. Rawns- 
ley, in Macinillans Magazine (August), vol. Ix., p. 

293- 
To Lord Tennyson, lines by Lewis Morris, in Macniillans 

Magazine (August). 
A Poem, by Alfred Austin, in The Spectator, vol. Ixiii., 

P- 175. 
Article in The Critic, vol. xv. , pp. 6g, 70. 
Article in The Critic, vol. xv., pp. 105-107, by Edmund 

Gosse. 
Article on The Bible in Tennyson, with portrait of Ten- 
nyson, by H. Van Dyke, in 7'he Century Magazine, vol. 

xvi., pp. 515-522. 
Article on Tennyson's First Flight, in .Scrilnicr' s Magazine, 

by H. Van Dyke. 
Both reprinted in Tlie Poetry of Tennyson, by Henry Van 

Dyke. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. xiii., 296. 
The Two Locksley Halls, by T. R. Lounsbury, in Scribner's 

Magazine, vol. vi., pp. 250-256. 
'R.Qv\evi ol Demeter, and Other Poe»ts, in The Academy, by H. 

B. Garrod, vol. xxxvi., pp. 413, 414. 
Review of Demeter, and Other Poems, in The Athenccum, 1889, 

vol. ii., pp. 883-885. 
Review of Demeter, and Other Poems, in The Spectator, vol. 

Ixiii., pp. 883, 884. 
The Undertones of Tennyson, in The Spectator, vol. Ixii. 

pp. 165, 166. 
Tennyson's Art and Genins, in The Baptist Revie~v (Jan- 
uary) (U. S.), by Eugene Parsons. 
The Poets Laureate of England, in 'The Methodist Recorder 

(February and March), by the Rev. G. Lester. 
Homes and LLaunts of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, hy George 

P. Napier. (Illustrated.) Pp. xvi., 204. (One hundred 

copies for private circulation.) Published Glasgow : J. 

Maclehose & Sons, 1892. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 1/7 

Translations : Enoch Ardcn. Traduit de V Anglais par E. 
Duglin, pp. 32. Beauvais. 

Enoch Ardcn. Ubcrsetzting atis den Englischcn von Grie- 
benow, pp. 35. Halle. 

The Poetical Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. A new edi- 
tion in one volume, pp. viii., 535. Also an edition con- 
taining the dramas. London and New York : Macmillan 
& Co., I vol., pp. v., 842. 

Tennyson Pictures, by W. Paget and H. Dicksee (with 
short criticisms of the poems illustrated). London : E. 
Nister (Nuremburg printed), obi. 4°. 

In Tennyson Land, by John C. Walters. Illustrated. Lon- 
don : George Redway, pp. viii., 108. 

The Laureate'' s Country, by Alfred J. Church, with illustra- 
tions from drawings by E. Hull. London : Seeley & Co., 
pp. Ill, fol. 

The Makers of Alodertt English, by W. J. Dawson (Ten- 
nyson, pp. 169-269). London. 

Article on Lord Tennyson in Nuova Antologia (Rome), by 
F. Rodriguez. 

Tennyson's ballad. The Voyage of Maeldune, with music 
by C. U. Stanford. London : Novello, Ewer & 
Co. 

Views and Reviews, by W. E. Henley. (Tennyson, pp. 154- 
158). London. 

Article on Tennyson in ChatUatiquan, vol, ii., pp. I73~I78, 
by E. Parsons. 

Tejinysoti and After? in The Fortnightly Review, vol. liii., 
pp. 621-637. 

(Same article in The Eclectic Magazine, vol. cxv.) 

Tennyson and Browning, in The Edinbtirgh Review, vol. 
clxxii., pp. 301-316. 

Tennyson and Browning, in The Leisure Hour, vol. xxxix., 
pp. 231-234, 

Tennyson and the Questionings of Our Age, in The Arena, 
by J. T. Brixby, vol, ii., pp. 57-71. 

Review of Denieter, and Other Poems, \vl The National Review^ 
by Alfred Austin, vol. xiv., pp. 694-702. 

Review of De?neter, and Other Poems, in The Atlantic 
Monthly, vol. Ixv., pp. 421-423, 



L 



1/8 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Review of Dcnu'tt-r, ami Otlu-r Forins, in Poet Lore, by 
C. Porter, vol. ii., pp. 201-207. 

Tenuvson's 1)1 Mrinoriam, in The N^e7i> Knglander, vol. liii., 
p. 492. 

Lo7'e Passages in Peniiyson, in T/ie A'ew E)iglaiide>\ by W. 
Higgs, vol. liii., pp. 126-142, and pp. 276-2S3. 

Tennyson s Pliiiosophy of tiie Future Life, in The Baptist 
Quarterly Pgvifw, by J. W. White, vol. xii., pp. 158- 
182. 

Tennyson's Sehool Pays, in The Pall Mall Gazette, by C. J. 
Caswell (June 19). 

Paper on Tennyson in The Examiner (New York), by E. 
Parsons (February). 

" In King Arthur's Capital" in Igdrasil (the journal of 
Ruskin Reading Guild), by J. C. Walters (November). 

" Christmas with Lord Tennyson" in The Fireside Maga- 
zine, by Rev. G. Lester (December). 

" An Arthurian Journey" in The Atlantic Monthly (June). 

Poem on Tennyson, in The Atlantic Monthly, by T. B. 
Aldrich (March). 

{The Lsles of Greece, Sappho and Ahwus, by Frederick 
Tennyson. London and New York : Macmillan <S: Co., 
pp. xiv., 443.) 

Tennyson's portrait, by G. F. Watts, given to Trinity Col- 
lege, Cambridge. 
1S91. To Sleep, printed in The Keiv Revie-.o (March). 

Pearl, an English poem of the fourteenth century. Edited 
with a modern rendering by J. Gollancy, ^vith introductory 
lines by L.ord Tennyson and a frontispiece by Holman 
Hunt. London : D. Nutt, pp. lii., 142. 

Lines in a volume of his Poems presented to Princess Louise 
of Schlcswig-Holstein. 

Lines on the christening of the daughter of the Duchess of 
Fife. 

The Poetical Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. A new edi- 
tion in one volume, revised, with new portrait. Macmil- 
lan ^^ Co., pp. 842. 

The Coining of Arthur and The Passing of Arthur, with 
introductions and notes by F. J. Rowe. Macmillan & 
Co., pp. xliii., 78. 



A TENNYSON PRIMP^R. 1 79 

Aylmcr's Field, with introduction and notes by F. J. Rowc 
and W. T. Webb. Macmillan & Co., pp. xxxi., 70. 

Enoch Arden, with introduction and notes by W. T. Webb. 

Macmillan & Co., pp. xxxiii., 60. 
Tennyson for the Young, with introduction and nf)tcs by 
A. Ainger. Macmillan & Co., pp. xiii., 120. 

Illustrations of '/'cniiyson, by J. Churton Collins. Lon- 
don : Chatto & Windus, pp. ix., 186. 

Nature in Books, by P. A. Graham. (Tennyson, Art and 
Scenery, pp. 44-65.) London. 

Victorian Poets, by Amy Sharp. (Tennyson, pp. 1-39.) 
London. 

A Vision of Fair IVoinen, a dramatic paraphrase (in verse) 
based upon Tennyson's Dream of luiir Woiiicn. Boston : 
W. H. Baker & Co., pp. 15. 

Tennyson's Foresters, in 'The Athcn(niiii , by Theodore Watts, 
vol. ii., pp. 461, 493, 494. (Same article in 'J'he Critic, 
vol. xix., pp 238, 239.) 

The Childhood of Tennyson, illustrated, in TJie Art Jour- 
nal, by P. A. Graham, vol. xliii., pp. 13-18 and 46-50. 

A Day tvith Tennyson, in The Forum, by E. Arnold, vol. 
xii., pp. 536-548. 

Illustrations of Animal Life in the Poems of Tennyson, in 
The Cornhill Magazine, vol. Ixiii., pp. 145-151. (Same 
article in LitteWs Living Age, vol, clxxxviii.) 

Tennyson' s Farmers of Lincolnshire, in The Westmin- 
ster Review, by J. J. Davis, vol. cxxxvi., pp. 132-137. 
(Same article in LitteWs Living Age, vol. cxci.) 

The Quotableness of Tennyson, in The Chautauquan, by 
E. Parsons, vol. xiii., pp. 334-337. 

Article on St. Agnes' Eve in Poet Lore, by A. S. Cook, vol. 
iii., pp. 10-17. 

The Study of Tennyson, in The Century Magazine, by 
A. Van Dyke, vol. xx., pp. 502-510. 

Reprinted in The Poetry of Tennyson. London : Elkin 
Mathews. 

The Literary Genealogy of Ulysses, in Poet Lore, by A. S. 
Cook, vol. iii., pp. 499-504. 

Lord Tennyson' s Birthday, in Notes and Queries (March 14), 
by C. J. Caswell. 



l8o A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

A Comitia of Errors in BiriiiingJiam IVeckly Mercury, by 
C. J. Caswell, April ii. 

Translation : Maud, Ein GcJicltt . . . iibcrsctzt von F. W. 
Weber. Zwcite verbesserte aujlage, pp. io8. Paderborn. 

{Dap/me, and Other Poems, by Frederick Tennyson. Mac- 
millan «& Co., pp. 522.) 

Tennyson spent part of the spring on a Mediterranean 
cruise, and in the same year visited Devonshire. 
1S92. Lines on "The De.a.th of the Duke of Cl.'^rence and 
AvoNDALE," printed in The Nineteenth Century (Febru- 
ary). 

The Foresters, produced at Daly's Theatre, New York 
(March iq), with Mr. Drew and Miss Ada Rehan as Robin 
Hood and Marian. 

On the same day a single formal performance of The Fores- 
ters, to secure copyright, was given at the Lj'ceum in Lon- 
don. 

The Foresters : Robin Hood and Maid Marian, by Alfred, 
Lord Tennyson (a play in four acts, in verse and prose). 
London and New York : Macmillan & Co., pp. 155. 

The Death of CEnone, Akbar's Dream, and Other 
Poems, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. London and New 
York : Macmillan & Co., pp. vi., 113. 

(Also an edition with five steel portraits of the author, pp. 
vi., III.) 

Gareth and Lynette, with introduction and notes by G. C. 
Macaulay. Macmillan & Co., pp. xxxv., 108. 

The Princess, with introduction and notes by Percy M. Wal- 
lace. Macmillan & Co., pp. lii., 233. 

The Marriage of Geraint ; Geraint and Enid, with intro- 
duction and notes by G. C. Macaulay. Macmillan & 
Co., pp. .xlv., 125. 

Idylls of the A'ing {in twelve books). Macmillan & Co., 

pp.421. (^"^ 

"In Memoriam : Alfred, Lord Tennyson, born^"?^ugust, 
iSog, died 6 October, 1892," "Crossing the Bar" [and] 
" A Poem." London (?), 1892, s. sh. 8°. 
Phases of Thought and Criticism, by Brother Azarias. Bos- 
ton. {The Spiritual Sense of In Memoriam, pp. 183- 
264.) 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. l8l 

The Golden Guess, essays, etc., by J. Y. Cheney (Tennysf)n 

and his Critics, pp. 161-201). 
A Sermon (Heb. xiii. 7). preached by H. M. Butler, 

Dean of Gloucester, in the Chapel of Trinity College, 

Cambridge, in reference to the death of Lord Tennyson. 

London : Macmillan & Bowes, pp. 15. 
Tennyson and our Imperial Heritage, by W. H. P. Gres- 

well. London : Gower & Co., pp. 23. 
Tennyson and In Memoriam, an appreciation and a study, 

by Joseph Jacobs. London : D. Nutt., pp. viii., 108. 
Alfred, Lord Tennyson : A Brief Study of his Life ana 

Poetry, by Arthur Jenkinson. London : J. Nisbet & Co., 

pp. X., 127. 
A Lecture : Tennyson s Idylls of the King, by W. M. Mac- 

Phail. London : Hitchcock, pp. 36. 
Popular Studies of Nineteenth Century Poets, by J. M. 

Mather. London. {Tennyson the Moodist, pp. 125- 

152.) 

Tennyson's Life and Poetry, and Mistakes Concerning Ten- 
nyson, by E. Parsons. Chicago : The Craig Press, pp. 29. 
(Enlarged edition, 1893.) 

Poets the Interpreters of their Age, by Anna Swanwick. 
London. (Tennyson, pp. 380-387-) 

In Memory of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the English Theocri- 
tus, etc. (verses, with portrait), by E. S. Sterne. London. 

Sermonettes from Tennyson, by A. Taylor, pp. 68. Bir- 
mingham. 

Shadotvs of the Stage, by William Winter. Edinburgh. 
(Tennyson's Foresters, pp. 269-285.) Second series, 
1893 (Tennyson, pp. 359-367)- 

" Funeral of the Right Hon. Lord Tennyson, Westminster 
Abbey, October 12, 1892" (order of service [including the 
text of two poems by Lord Tennyson, " Crossing the 
Bar" and "The Silent Yoices"]). London : Harrison & 
Sons, s. sh. fol. 

Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Broivning, by A. 
Thackeray Ritchie, pp. 245. London : Macmillan^ Co. ; 
New York : Harper & Brothers, pp. 190. 

Tennyson died October 6. 

Article on Tennyson, in The Academy, by Joseph Jacobs 



lS2 A TENNYSON TKIMKU. 

(October 15), vol. xlii,, i^p. 335-337. (RcpriiUcd in 
'J't-iinyson mil/ hi Mciiioriaiii [I). Nutt].) 
Article on 'J'liinysoii, in T/ir Athi-iuriini , by 'riieodore 
Watts (October 8 and 22), vol. 11., \>\\. 482, 483 and 

555. 55f'- 
Article on y'fiinysoii, in T/ie Aiu/oi'cr Kcviciv, by S. 11. 

Thayer (November), vol. xviii., pp. 460-478. 
Article on 'JViinysoii, in /.ii A't)//7Y//i' A'(TUi , by F. Lobee 

(November i), pp. 173-181. 
Article on 'J'l/iin'soii, in Daluini, with portrait, by K. 

Koenijr (November 19), pp. 102-104. 
Article on Tctinysoii, in Blackivooifs jU<i<;(i'iii'' (November), 

vol. ciii., pp. 748-768. 
Article on 'J'liiiiysoii, in the C<i//it>/ir JI'i'/-/,/, with portrait, 

by M. F. Ejjan (November), vol. Ivi., pp. 149-157. 
Article on 7\iiiiysoii, in 7V/(' Contemporary Ki'7<ic~d', by 

Stopford A. Brooke (December), vol. l.\ii., pp. 761-7S5. 
Article on Tiiuiysott, in '/'//(■ Cri/ic (October 15 and 29), 

with portrait, pp. 203, 204, 237, by 11. \'an Dyke ; also 

articles (November 5 and 12), pp. 254-257 and 2S5-290. 
Article on Trniiyson, in T/ic Cosmopolitan, by G. Stewart 

(December), vol. xiv., p. 169. 
Article on Tennyson, in T/w Dial, Chicago (October 16), 

vol. xiii., pp. 231-234. 
Article on Tennyson, in Reiuie J^hiie, by Mary Darmcs- 

teter, torn, xlix., pp. 619-623. 
Article on Tennyson, in (7en//eman's J/',ii;inine, U.S. 

(November), pp. 535-540. 
Article on Tennyson, in Literary Worhi, Hoston (Octo- 
ber 22), vol. xxxiii., ]ip. 372,373. 
Article on Tennyson, in Maeinil/an's jVaoacine, by A. 

.\in,i;er (November), vol. Ixvii.. pp. 76-So. 
Article on Tennyson, in TJie A'ation, by J. W. Chadwick 

(October 13), vol. Iv., pp. 276-278. 
Article on Tennyson, in T/ie S/>ee/ator (October 8), vol. 

Ixix., pp. 484, 485. 
Article on Tennyson, \i\ Tlie S<itnri/ay A'eTien', \'o\. \\\\v. , 

jip. 405, 406. 
.\ilirle on Teniivson, in T/ie It'estminster A'er'ie:,' (De 

cember), vol. exxxviii., pj). 589-596. 



A TENNYSON PRIMKU 183 

Article on Tennyson, in The Revicrv of Reviews, hy W. 
T. Stead (illustrated), vol. vi., pp. 435-447. 

Article on Tennyson, in "J'tie New Review, by Edmund 
Gosse and I lerbert Paul (November), vol. vii. , pp. 5 1 3-537 
(Same article Litlell's Living Age, vol. cxcv.) 

Poem in The Spectator (October 15), by G. H. Warren, 
p. 528. 

Poem in The London Lllustrated Ne^us, by William Watson 
(October 8). 

Love and Duty in Tennyson and Bro'ioning, in Poet Lore, by 
E. F. R. Stitt, vol. iv., pp. 271-274. 

Tennyson and Whittier, with portraits, in The Arena, by 
W. J. Fowler, vol. vii., pp. i-ii. 

Relations of Tennyson and Whitman to Science, in The 
Dial, Chicago, by J. Burroughs, vol. xiv., pp. 168, 169. 

Aspects of Tennyson (ist paper), in 77/*? Nineteenth Cen- 
tury, by H. D. Traill, vol. xxxii., pp. 952-956. (Same 
article in LJttell's Living Age, vol. cxcvi.) 

Bibliography of Tennyson, in The Critic, vol. xxi., p. 211. 

Review of Death of QLnone, and Other Poems, in The Acad- 
emy, by L. Johnson (November 5), vol. xlii., pp. 403, 
404. 

Review of Death of Ginone, and Other J'oeins, in Poet Lore 
(December), vol. iv., pp 640-643. 

Review of Death of (Enone, and Other 7'oems, in Athentrtim 
(November 19), vol. ii., pp. 695-697. 

Review of Death of (Enone, and Other L'oems, in Saturday 
Review (November 5), vol. Ixxiv., pp. 536, 537. 

Early French Estimates of Tennyson, in 'The A thenreum 
(October 22), vol. ii., pp. 554, 555. 

Fancy of Tennyson, in The Spectator (April 2), vol. Ixviii., 
pp. 458, 459. 

Review of Tennyson's Foresters in I'he Academy, by W. 
Watson (April 9), vol. xli., pp. 341, 342. 

Review of Tennyson's Foresters in The Saturday Review, 
vol. Ixxiii., pp. 391, 392. 

Review of Tennyson's Foresters in 'Plie A thena'um (April 
16), vol. i., pp. 491-493. 

Review of Tennyson's Foresters in The Gentleman' ^ Maga- 
zine, U. S. (May), vol. xlviii., pp. 528-532. 



184 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

Maid Marian on the Stage, in The Theatre, by A. W. 

Walkley, vol. xxviii., pp. 227-231. 
Notice of the Funeral of Tennyson in The Literary World 

(November 5), vol. xxiii., pp. 388, by J. R. Macquoid. 
Notice of the Funeral of Tennyson in LittelVs Living Age 

(November 19), vol. cxcv., p. 510. 
Notice of the Fntieral of Tennyson in The Spectator (Octo- 
ber 15), vol. Ixix., pp. 516, 517. 
Notice of the Funeral of Tennyson in The Critic (November 

26), pp. 286-290. 
The Genius of Tennyson, in The Spectator (October 15), 

vol. Ixix., pp. 522-524. 
(Same article in The Eclectic Magazine, vol. cxix., and 

LittelVs Living Age, vol. cxcv.) 
Homes of Tennyson at Aldiuorih and Farringford, in The 

English Illustrated Magazine, by Grant Allen, vol. x., 

pp. 145-156. 
In the Laureate's Footsteps, in Good Words (illustrated), by 

G. Winterwood, vol. xxxiii., pp. 670-678. 
The Celtic Element in The Lady of Shalott, in Poet Lore, by 

A. R. Brown (August and September), vol. iv., pp. 408- 

415. 

The Latest V'erses of Tennyson, in The Gentle/nan's Maga- 
zine, U. S. (December), vol. xlix., pp. 641, 642. 

T/ie Literary Sensitiveness of Tennyson, in The National 
Reviezi', by Alfred Austin (December), vol. xx., pp. 454- 
460. 

(Same article in Eclectic Magazine, vol. cxx.) 

Art and Architecture in Tennyson's Poems, in The Ameri- 
can Architect (November 5), vol. xxxviii., p. 87. 

Poetical Tributes to Tennyson,, poems in The Nineteenth 
Century, by the editor, T. H. Huxley, F. W. H. Myers, 
and others (November), vol. xxxii., pp. 831-844. 

Poetical Tributes to Tennyson in The Spectator, by D. Beale 
(October 29), vol. Ixix , p. 595. 

Tennyson iaiia, in The Athenueuiii (October 15, November 
26), vol. ii., p. 517, pp. 741, 742. 

Tennysoniana, in The Critic (December 3), vol. xxi . , pp. 

315, 316. 
Tennysoniana, in The Dial, Chicago, vol. .xiii., pp. 265-267. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 1 85 

The Theology of Tennyson, in The Spectator, vol. Ixix., pp. 

642, 643. 
(Same article in Eclectic Magazine, vol. cxix.) 
Visit to Tennyson, in The Critic, by W. J. Rolfe, vol. xxi., 

pp. 285, 286. 
Tennyson's Works, in The Spectator, vol. Ixviii., pp. 201, 

202. 
Enoch Arden. 7"exte Anglais pub liJ avec une notice sur la 

vie et les cetivres de Tennyson, une etude sur la versification 

du prime des notes . . . et des appendices par A. Beljame, 

pp. 120. Paris, 
Enoch Arden . . . avec . . . des notes . . .par A. Beljame. 

Paris. 
1893. Poems by Two Brothers. A reprint of the 1827 edition. 

With facsimiles of part of the MS. and a preface by Hal- 
lam, Lord Tennyson, pp. xix., 251. London : Macmil- 

lan & Co. 
Poems . . . illustrated (reprinted from the edition of 1857), 

pp. xiii., 374. Macmillan & Co. 
The Holy Grail. With introduction and notes by G. C. 

Macaulay, pp. xl., 86. Macmillan & Co. 
Selections from Tennyson. With introduction and notes by 

J. F. Rowre and W. T. Webb. 2 parts. Macmillan & Co. 
Maud : A Monodrama, pp. 69. Macmillan & Co. 4°. 
Becket. As arranged for the stage by Henry Irving. Mac- 
millan & Co. 
Tennyson' s Heroes and Heroines. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. 

London : Tuck & Sons. 
The Teaching of Tennyson, by E. H. Blakeney. Reprinted 

from The Churchman, pp. 8. 
Essays, Addresses, etc., by the Rev. T. C. Finlayson. 

(Tennyson's In Memoriam, pp. 1-35.) Macmillan & 

Co. 
The Scenery of Tennyson's Poems. Etchings after drawings 

by various artists. With introduction and descriptive 

letterpress by B. Francis. London : J. & E. Bumpus. 
Questions at Issue, by Edmund Gosse. (Tennyson, pp. 

175-198.) 
" The Poems of A. H. Hallam, together with his Essay on 

the Lyrical Poems of AWred Tennyson." Edited, with an 



1 86 A TENNYSOX TRIMKR. 

introduction, by R. Le Galliennc, pp. xxxix., 139. E. 

Mathews and John Lane. 
Sfers am/ Siti^-^i/s, by A. D. Inncs. (Tennyson, pp. 26-49.) 
Essays on Lord Tennyson's hlylls of the King, by Harold 

Littlcdale, pp. x., 30S. 
Nciv Stud'us ill Titinysoit, including a Commentary on 

Maud, by Morton Luce (2d edition), pp. 96. Clifton : 

J. Barker & Son. 
The Pods ami t/u- IW/rv of the Century. (Frederick Tenny- 
son to Clough.) (Alfred Tennyson, by A. H. Japp, pp. 

67-102.) 
Seieme ami a Future Life, by F. W. II. Myers. (Tennyson 

as prophet, pp. 127-165.) 
Tennyson as a Thinker, by Henry Salt, pp. 56. London ; 

W. Reeves. 
Death of Tennyson, by John Parnell (in verse), a single sheet. 

London. 
Alfred, Lord Tennyson and his Friends. A series of twenty- 
five portraits in photogravure from the negatives of Mrs. 

J. M. Cameron and H. H. H. Cameron. Reminiscences 

by A. Thackeray Ritchie. With introduction by H. H. H. 

Cameron. London : T. F. Unwin, folio. 
Tennyson : Poet, Phiiosofher, Ldea/ist. Studies on the life. 

work, and teaching of the Poet Laureate (Tennysonian 

chronology). With portrait, pp. viii., 370. London : 

Kegan Paul & Co. _ 1 
Alfred, Lord 'Tennyson, by Arthur Waugh (2d edition, 

enlarged), pp. x., 332. London : Heinemann. 
Fni;/ish J'oetry from fiiahe to Broronim^', by W. Macneile 

Dixon. (Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, pp. 1SS-200.) 

Lonilon : Methuen .S: Co. 
Article on V'ennyson, in Harpers Magazine, by A Fields 

(January), vol. IxxxVi., pp. 309-312. 
Article on Tennyson, in The Chureh Quarterly, vol. 

XXXV., pp. 485-506. 
^ 7 ennyson and Proponing as Spiritual Forees, in The A^eio 

World, by C. C. Everett (June), vol. ii., pp. 240-256. 
Tennyson and the Meaning of Life, in The A'ineteent': 

Century, by F. \V. H. Myers (^January), vol. xxxiii., pp. 93- 

111. 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 1 87 

7\n)iyson on the /'ti/iin' Life, in The Spectator (March 4). 

vol. L\x., p. 283. 
Tennyson as a Nature Poet, in 'The Nineteenth Century. 

by Theodore Walts (May), vol. xxxiii., pp. 836-S56. 

(Same article, June and July.) 
Tennyson as the Poet of Evolution, in The Nineteenth 

Century, by Theodore Watts (October), vol. xxxiv., pp. 

657-672. (Same article, December.) 
Tennyson as the Religious J<'.xponent of his Age, in The 

Sicnday Magazine, by J. Wedgwood (January), vol. xxii., 

pp. 34-38. 
Aspects of 'Tennyson. One of a series of articles in The 

NiTieteenth Century, by the editor (January), vol. xxxiii., 

pp. 164-168. (Same article in Littell's Living Age, vo\. 

cxcvi.) 
At the Laureate's Funeral. A poem in 'J'he National 

Revieto by the Duke of Argyll (January), vol. xx., pp. 

581-586. 
The Real Thomas Becket, in The Nineteenth Century, by 

Agnes Lambert, vol. xxxiii., pp. 273-292. 
"Becket at the Lyceum Theatre," in 'The Spectator i^chxa- 

ary 25), vol. Ixx., p. 253. 
"Becket at the Lyceum Theatre," in The Academy, by F. 

Wedmore (February 18), vol. xliii., pp. 158, I5<.)- 
"Becket at the Lyceum Theatre," in 'J'he Saturday Review 

(February 11), vol. Ixxv., pp. 146-147. 
" Becket at the Lyceum Theatre," in 'The Art Journal (\\\u^- 

trated), by J. Hatton (April), vol. xlv., pp. 105-109. 
Tennyson's Classical Poems, in 'The Nineteenth Century, 

by H. Paul (March), vol. xxxiii., pp. 436-453- (Same 

article, May.) 
A Word inith Dissenters about 'Tennyson, in 'J'he Dial. 

Chicago, by P. Shorey (February 16), vol. xiv., pp. 102, 

103. 
The Earliest Poems of 'Pennyson, in 'J'he Critic (May 2), 

vol. xxii., pp. 333-335- 
Tennyson's Elaine and Shake.^pcre's Miranda, in Poet Lore, 

by S. D. Davies (January), vol. v., p. 15. 
LJow to Study In Memoriam, in J'oet J.ore, by 11. A. 

Clarke (November), vol. v.. pp. 574-582. 



1 88 A TENNYSON PRIMER. 

The Two Lockslcy Halls, in Poet Lore (January), vol. v., 

P- 34- 
Tennyson^ s Place hi Poetry, in The Dial, Chicago, by E. 

E. Hale (February i6), vol. xiv., pp. loi, 102. 
Poem on Tennyson, in The AHneteenth Century, by A. C. 

Swinburne (January), vol. xxxiii., pp. 1-3. (Same in Ec- 
lectic Magazine, vol. cxx.) 
Review of The Poetry of Tennyson in The Quarterly 

Revieiv, vol. clxxvi., pp. 1-39. 
Recollections of Tennyson, in TJie Century Magazine, by 

J. A. Symonds (May), vol. xlvi., pp. 32-37. 
The Study of Tennyson in Class, in Education, by H. M- 

Reynolds (February), vol. xiii., p. 359. 
Talks luith Tennyson, in Tlie Contemporary Revieio, by 

A. G. Weld, vol. Ixiii., pp. 394-397. 
Tennysoniana, in The Sunday Afagazine {]anua.ry, February, 

March), vol. xxii., pp. 50-53, 122-125, 201-205. 
The Voice of Tennyson, in The Century Magazine, by 

H. Van Dyke, vol. xlv., pp. 539-544- 
Was Tennyson Consistent ? in The Atnerican Catholic Quar- 
terly, by G. P. Lathrop, vol. xviii., p. loi. 
Was Tennyson either Gnostic or Agnostic? in The Spec- 
tator (January 7), vol. Ixx., p. 10. (Same article in LittelVs 

Living Age, vol. cxcvi.) 
Translations : Des Koenigs. Idyllen metrisch vertaald door 

J. H. F. Le Comte, pp. 296. Rotterdam. 
Ay liner's Field . . . Deutsch von H. Griebenow, pp. 49. 

Halle. 
1894. Tennyson : His Art and Relation to Modern Life, by 

Stopford A. Brooke, pp. vi., 490. London : Isbister & 

Co. 
Tenrtyson's Ldylls of the King and Arthurian Story from the 

XVIth Century, by M. W. Maccallum. Glasgow : 

Maclehose & Sons, pp. xiv., 435. 
'Tis Sixty Years Since; or. The Tii'o Locksley Halls, by 

H. S. Wilson. London : Kegan Paul & Co., pp. 45. 
Article on Tennyson in The New Revierc, by Francis 

Adams (March), pp. 311-323. 
Tennyson and Dante, in Temple Par, by Francis St. J. 

Thackeray (July), pp. 387-397' 



A TENNYSON PRIMER. 1 89 

Tennyson as a Humorist, in The Nineteenth Century, by 

H. D. Traill, vol. xxxv., pp. jbi-Tj^. 
New Lights on Tennyson, in The Sunday Magazine, by 

H. V. Taylor (May), pp. 344-347. 
The Religion of Tennyson, in The Arena, by W. H- 

Savage (April), pp. 582-592. 
Turncoat of Tennyson, in The Westminster Review, by J. J. 

Davies (November), pp. 558-566. 
The Trees and Flowers of Tennyson, in Temple Bar (Novem- 
ber), pp. 358-366. 
A Visit to the Tennysons in 1839, '"^ Blackwood' s Magazine, 

by B. Teeling (May), pp. 605-621. 
Translation : Balladen und lyrische Gedichte iibcrtaagen von 

Sophie von Harbon, pp. viii,, 208. Charlottenburg, 



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